Design Practice: Brief 1 - Frame (Photoshop): Experimenting with Leaves

After researching artists who use watercolour to paint leaves I decided to have a go myself to see what kind of things I could produce. The first thing that I did was collect leaves so that I had something real to paint from.

This was my first leaf painting where the smaller on eon the left was playing around with tonal range and blending lightly from yellowy greens through to more browny reds. The larger leaf really captures the essence of the leaf. The edges are crisp and un-neat almost like its curled back on itself. This style could work well on a smaller scale and repeated in a natural frame.

This was another experimentation with colour. The plan for this is to draw with a black pen over the top to get the out lines and use white to highlight the leafs skeleton. As a base colour this works well however if it was to be left as just paint this would work as well as it doesn't look finished and it has nothing on the top one.

This was a leaf collage made with a paper maché style. This is something that may make a good back drop when edited in photoshop.

These three little leaves were looking at a previous idea of having the repeat pattern. However after doing this it became clear that it would be easier to replicate with use of a stamp.

Potato stamping seemed like the obvious solution to get quick stamps as its easily accessible and can produce many prints. The work doesn't take long to dry and multiple stamps are cheap and quick to make.

The first print was not recognisable as a leaf but once some of the paint had been removed some lovely prints were formed. The nice thing about this method is that white speckles where the ink hadn't touched were left so the paper showed through. Once this has ben repeated a few times it looks like a set without all looking identical this really makes the frame seem more individual like time has been put into producing the artwork.