15 watercolor leaf paintings

15 watercolor leaf paintings - student project

This class challenged me in a way I didn’t

think it could. I normally paint with a round brush so switching to a dagger brush was hard for me. I thought for sure once I figured out how to make the shape it would go easy. I started this class with a large sheet and I made overlapping vines in different colors until I felt comfortable enough to start on a small sheet, however it still took way longer than I thought to get a 1 stroke leaf down on one of the sides of the vine. I learned quickly that for one side of the stem I could turn my paper upside down and boom simple one stroke leaves of a similar size and snap all the way down but on the other side I needed the page right side up and that took me about 10 paintings to finally be able to make a consistent shape and even then every page had 1-more very weird leaves all

of a sudden. I didn’t like how the paint would pool at the end of the stroke but for some paintings I would leave it and in some I would make it a 2-3 stroke leaf instead.
My favorite part was going back in and decorating them. I used mostly metallic watercolors but on some I used a white gel pen.  My favorite painting was the biggest one with 5 stems. It was so easy to paint as it was the last one. I decorated it only in gel

pen because I couldn’t decide what metallic  paint to use and I really like how simple and clean it is. 15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 1 - student project

15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 2 - student project

 15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 3 - student project
15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 4 - student project
15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 5 - student project
15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 6 - student project
15 watercolor leaf paintings - image 7 - student project