I did it! It turned out much better than I thought it would.

Sorry, the lighting is not great, something I have been working on improving! I recently got a new light, so hopefully for my next post the pictures will be better.








I started by lightly sketching the leaf, including the holes. As I said in my last post, I am not ready for the purely free style of sketching with just the water on my brush!

I then started dropping color, first yellow, then the red and then the blue. This was such a fast process, I did not get pictures of me dropping the color in! I am going to redo this one soon and I promise I will do better about photo journaling the process.


The leaf was very wet by the time I got all the color in so there were puddles of paint, it was great.

I lightly dabbed the larger puddles with a tissue.You can go in with a thirsty (barely damp) brush as well, but sometimes you have more control with a tissue and can prevent smudging.

I did very light blending with my brush, and that was only after the
colors began to merge on their own. You can see the effect leaves
a beautiful feathering of color.

To add the stem and the veining I used a very heavy pigment of the blue and red. I mixed them until I had a maroon color and then I applied it to the leaf. The leaf was still wet, but had dried to a heavy damp and applying a thicker pigment allowed the veining to stay visible but blend in with the rest of the colors.

Here is the original video again. I hope you try it out--it was a blast! Remember, the leaf is the second part of the video!