Nature's Still Life #1

Okay, here is painting #1 in a series of 20 I need to do for Mike Bailey's Beyond the Obvious Class. I purposely chose something from nature, because for the last two years, I chose things with wine bottles or wine glasses and drove myself crazy getting the ellipses correct. I figure this way I can change the shape of the leaves, rocks, or twig, and they'll still look like what they are. This started from a photo (I probably took about 25; just tossing the objects on to a white piece of paper in the front driveway at a time of day with good shadows). I made the big leaf slightly bigger so it's stem didn't end up exactly in the middle of the painting. I added the extra rock in the top right so that strong curve of the leaf would get broken up. And I changed the shape on one of the rocks to make it repeat a leaf shape.

I was generally pleased with this one, but I had a little trouble with my shadows. The rocks all seemed like they were floating (the reflected color lighted the shadow too much). And when I tried to darken the shadow it lost its transparent color and got a muddier than I wanted. You really need to get the shadows correct the first time, because reworking them is never quite as clean.