Sept. Progress Update

Sun Take 3 isn't finished but I wanted to post an update today. The background esp. needs more work. I am thinking about overlaying an entirely different color, hopefully something that will make that lime green stand out more. If I don't manage that I may overlay the green with a darker color to make it more apparent.  I am also not sure if this is right side up, it may be upside down or sideways.

Below is another scan of  a work in progress:

I have started the fills on the 2nd version my leaf pattern. Got sidetracked with other things so I haven't made as much progress here as I would have preferred.

On a slightly different note, I was prodded by a question about the focal point of first version of these leaves to look at the finished work in gray scale. Oops, turns out the outer blue and the bottom yellow orange have almost the same value. And while the red really pops to the non-color blind, its value in gray scale isn't as dark as I expected. All in all it was apparent to me that the over all balance of the piece doesn't work without color. Not sure all of this is totally relevant but it is something for me to think about while working on this new version.

Below is my Journal page from Monday's visit to the Daniel Webster Audubon Site:

More leaves, the top leaf above is from a White Birch that turned out to be an import from Europe. I don't mean these exact trees I mean the species. They do make lovely ornamental trees for the yard so at some point trees (or seeds) were brought to America and planted around homes. The seeds escaped as seeds often do and now they can be found growing where they weren't planted.

The leaf below that is a red maple, a tree which will grow in swampy ground. Since most of Daniel Webster was a farm in the past there are only a few stands of trees on the property. These stands tend to be in swampy areas not suitable for farming, so the presence of the Red Maples is no surprise. The young red maples have lovely smooth grayish bark, a way to identify them from other maples.

As fall has just officially started I am trying to capture as many leaves as I can before they disappear from the trees until next spring. I am finding them quite interesting to draw, each so similar but so different.

The top drawing is of a type of bedstraw, not really sure the variety, there are a lot of different ones. This one has little white flowers with 4 petals, and leaves in whorls of 4. There were lots of these plants growing beside the mowed paths. This is an unobtrusive plant, so the drawing isn't very elaborate.

A last photo for today:

The above was made at Daniel Webster this past Monday, and is of some of the European White Birch trees that my leaf came from.

That is it for today, per usual comments are welcome.