Week 9 - Paint a Macro Organic Item

Li-Sa suggested we paint something organic but take a close up look at it like you do with macro on a camera and paint or draw what we see. So one afternoon I wandered around my yard and took a heap of photos of flowers and leaves up close. Decided on this one leaf as it had a lot of lovely veins through it with different shades of green.


Thought I would try my hard pastels for this one. Found it quite hard to get the right colours of the different greens - the vein down the middle is quite yellow with a lime green edge. The dark green markings on the leaf had touches of dark red and white blobs which you don't really notice at first when looking at the whole leaf - these colours only seem to appear when you take a "macro look" at it. I put a brown border around the leaf to finish it off.

Forgot how messy working with pastels was - used only cartridge paper and it didn't take as much colour as I would have liked. Didn't mind this exercise but not one of my favourites.