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How to Paint a Basic Leaf with Watercolors

As a craftsman, I appreciate exploring different avenues regarding different mediums. One of my most loved mediums recently is watercolor. I admire it can be overwhelming medium to some, however as with most things in life, the more you practice, the less demanding it gets to be. The excellence of watercolor is the dynamic results you can accomplish by controlling it for basic theoretical craftsmanship, or dazzling and complex authenticity workmanship.

It's no big surprise watercolor has made such an awesome return in style as well as stylistic layout and configuration.

With fall quick drawing closer, I thought it would be fun and fitting to demonstrate to paint an extremely fundamental watercolor leaf. You can apply the same system to different leaves and make a delightful gem.

Foliage can be discovered all over the place and in all seasons, arriving in a variety of shapes, sizes and hues.

The accompanying instructional exercise gives an essential procedure to paint leaves, however ideally urges you to attempt different systems to accomplish your own particular painting style.

Supplies needed:

Watercolor set

Different watercolor brushes (I utilized #0, #10 and #20)

Watercolor paper

Different leaves from the greenery enclosure or photographs of leaves for reference

Palette

The main thing you will need to do is set up your shading palette and test the hues on a different bit of paper. Try not to be reluctant to play around with the different shades until you land at hues you are satisfied with and guarantee you mess around with this procedure.

Here is a quick chart of the colors I used:

1. Permanent sap green

2. Green blue shade

3. Raw amber

4. Blue green

5. Burnt sienna

(the other shades are a mixture of the various colors above)

 

Lightly sketch a basic leaf shape and fill it in with a wet brush. This will make the spreading of the first layer easier.

Apply the lightest shade of green you have prepared.

Allow first layer to dry slightly and apply the second lightest shade (you will see a little bit of bleeding occur).

Here I applied yet another layer of the same color and while the paint was still wet, I tilted the paper ever so slightly to allow the paint to travel to the tip of the leaf. You can see the darker concentration of paint.

Allow to dry and apply yet another shade of green.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, watercolor is all about layers; the more layers you apply, the more vivid the image becomes.

Dip your brush in water and go over the surface of the leaf. While still wet, apply a light layer of the raw amber to the lighter side of the leaf.

While the paint is still wet, load your brush with burnt sienna and allow paint to drip onto leaf. You can see the paint colors bleeding into each other.

Drip the paint in various areas as desired.

With a wet thin brush (#0), draw in some veins and allow to dry. You can continue to add more details if you wish.

Here is the entire process so you can see the progress.

As you become more familiar with this process, you can start to really enhance the detail.  Personally, I like the looseness of watercolor.

Practice and have fun with it!

A (good) word of caution – watercolor can become very addictive and the more you pick up that brush, the more likely you will be to fall in love with it.

You can apply the same technique to paint variations of leaves, remembering the beauty of watercolor is it does not have to be perfect

Here is a fun piece I did using similar principles.

 

I hope you check back for future posts, where I will continue to provide watercolor tutorials.