This one requires little explanation (click for larger version). I will say that this is a pretty exact portrait of a real red maple leaf, and I was psyched that I managed to draw it to touch the border at all of it's tips on the first attempt. Our youngest couldn't believe I hadn't traced the leaf, which he saw lying beside the finished drawing.And so the ephemeral (the leaf is long ago curled up, browned, and in some wet heap up in the mountains) is made permanent, passing through me on the way. I really like that aspect of drawing.
Drawn on deep pink circular card stock. Gotta get more of that.
PS - I wrote this post back in mid October, and then never published it. So it's late, now, with all the winter weather hitting the Midwest and Northeast... And I DID get more of this pink stock.
7 comments:
That's really beautiful. I love the colors. The holes in the leaf make it seem so real!
Is the pink of the paper the pink I see for the border and on the leaf?
DCup - Yeah, I liked the holes a lot, too.
Karen A - Yes - and you can see this one in Fearington, where all these circles go...
The leaves here have been so very colourful this fall - what a lovely way to 'preserve' one's beauty! & fun that it 'turned out' touching all around on the first try!!
Dia - Welcome and Thanks!
Steve, this is beautiful. And seeing it puts your comment about one of my photographs into perspective; you seem almost to have made the leaf exist by drawing in what isn't the leaf.
In a way which doesn't exactly logically correlate, one of the challenges I see in photography is balancing isolation against context.
Somehow those two things are related in my mind, though I'm not clear about the connection.
Cunning Runt - I had to think for a minute what you meant by isolation and context, but then it came suddenly clear. Yes, that's it exactly! How much of the surrounding shapes and space are needed to set the object - and how much is going to lose the object, or change the subject to something else, which is made of the object and the context together. And what context (from which angle, cropped how, etc.)? I hadn't thought about it that clearly, before - that will probably clarify some of the problems I deal with in some compositions.
Yes, the leaf did feel like a carving project - I drew black everywhere there was no leaf. I only added the other colors on the pink after the black was done and it needed more to make it "pop."
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