Autumn Leaves, Two Views

 Autumn Leaves 1 

Tombow dual tip pens on sketchbook

I worked on these at the same time. First sketched the leaf shapes in pencil on the second one and inked the black background with my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, then while that ink was drying took out some Tombows to sketch two of the referenced leaves in Tombows. The colors on the browned leaf are a little closer to the photo in this but lighter in value. I liked the effect. Sketched water ripples without filling in any dark around them, it was a study for the colored pencils version and I liked how it came out. This one makes up for yesterday's weather day, no sketching. I slept like my cat yesterday and barely managed to make coffee let alone do anything else.

Autumn Leaves 2

Pentel brush pen and Prismacolor Watercolor colored pencils

large Moleskine watercolor journal

This one I put more thought, layers and technical detail into. I washed the first flat layer of colored pencils in pink, gold and bright canary yellow for the three leaves. When that flat color dried, I used a scribing tool from Derwent to incise the veins so that going dry over dried wash, I'd have clean bright contrasting lines. That worked great. Last, with several colors per leaf, I went over them detailing and doing the water drops over portions of the yellow leaf.

I'm happy with this and posted it as my entry in the Blick Colored Pencils contest, theme Autumn. Definitely happy with it as the example of my work. Much faster using these techniques than my old colored pencils stuff!