#5 - Rocky Leaves

This painting was alot of fun (and alot of work). I started by planning out how I wanted your eye to move through the painting. The warm yellow is supposed to move your eye from the lower left corner and weave through and around the leaves and back to the smaller leaf. I also positioned the smaller rocks to follow this path.

I used that fun wax paper technique of apply wax paper shapes to wet paint and then painting over it to define the shapes. The problem was that once I had cut out all those rock shapes and figured out their placement, I realized I had to remove them all to apply the paint. Then I couldn't figure out how they were all supposed to fit again. Anyway, it worked, just took some finagling. When I pulled off the wax paper, the rocks had all these wonderful textures. I had to add the darker shades of color between the rocks and glaze over some of the rocks to give them more form. The leaves were fairly straight forward, but I did struggle a bit trying to keep the back leaf muted enough. I tried to lose the back edge of the large leaf by making it the same value as the background, and make the front leaf have light against dark on one side and dark against light on the other. I think I will try to exaggerate this a bit more in a future painting.

One of the other challenges was figuring out the shadow patterns. I really had to think to decide how the twig shadows would bend over the rounded rocks. I didn't want them to be too distracting so they are not as dark as the shadows between the rocks, which I think was the right decision. Overall, I'm very pleased with this painting. There is alot going on, but it seems to work together.