Over the weekend we had dinner with some family members down in Monterey, and my niece gave me a leaf. She had collected it somewhere and carried it around for a while, and I never did get a clear answer about where it came from. To me it looks like a magnolia leaf. When I said it looked like a fun leaf to paint, she told me I could take it home.
The next day I sat at my desk and studied the leaf for a while. And, as most things do, the leaf became more complicated the longer I looked at it. The shape wouldn’t be difficult to get on paper, but I wanted to work with the colors. I always think that getting the right color is easier with colored pencils than watercolors, so I started with what I assumed would be the greater challenge.
As anticipated, I had real difficulties with the highlights. I still haven’t figured out how to paint shine. And in retrospect it might have been better to paint wet-on-wet instead of letting the paint dry before adding more color.
And that shape, which I thought would be a slam-dunk? I was so wrong about that! The paper in my sketchbook isn’t heavy watercolor paper at all, and with all the erasing I had to do to get that foreground curve right I was afraid I’d remove too much of the texture. I like the overall effect, and I did kind of get the perspective right, which is always hard for me. I stopped before experimenting more with the bright highlights because I didn’t want to overwork this sketch. I still don’t know what to do about those.
Now, onto the pencil version.
As I noted in the sketchbook, what I thought would be easier ended up being not. I do like the color rendition here, and I think the toned paper works well. And as an aside, the Prismacolor Black Grape pencil does make pretty shadows. In this sketch I positioned the highlights with too much symmetry, and as a result this leaf looks like a feather. It might look better if I made the veins more visible. I can still do that.
Looking at both of these sketches, I think I like the watercolor version better. What do you think?