Leaves of Virginia: A Simple Watercolor Study for Fall
I’ve been spending more time with watercolor lately, mostly because I’m enjoying another way to explore the things that already show up in my work. Plants, trees, animals, trails, and the changing seasons have always found their way into Wild Ridge Studio, whether I’m working in pyrography, illustration, or surface pattern design. Watercolor gives me a completely different way to play with those same subjects.
With fall approaching here in Virginia, leaves seemed like an obvious place to start.
I wasn’t interested in turning this into a highly detailed botanical study or trying to paint perfectly realistic leaves. I wanted something simpler: different leaf shapes, a handful of autumn colors, and an opportunity to practice watercolor without making the whole thing unnecessarily complicated. Because sometimes the quickest way to ruin a perfectly enjoyable afternoon of making art is to turn it into an assignment.
Keeping the Leaf Study Simple
I chose several different leaf shapes and painted each one individually on watercolor paper. Some are broad and rounded, some deeply lobed, some long and narrow, and others have the familiar pointed shapes we tend to associate with fall. The colors were just as much a part of the experiment as the shapes.
There are still plenty of greens because September isn’t peak fall here yet, but I also worked in olive, yellow, rusty orange, deeper red, and brown. Rather than trying to perfectly match a particular specimen, I let myself experiment with how the watercolor moved across each shape and how different colors worked together. I added simple line work for the veins and details, which gave the leaves a little more definition without losing the loose watercolor feeling I wanted. They’re imperfect. Some colors blended more than others. Some edges behaved, and some absolutely did not.
Not Everything Has to Become a Masterpiece
One of the things I’m trying to give myself more room for creatively is making studies simply because I want to explore something. There doesn’t always need to be a finished collection mapped out before I begin. I don’t need to know whether something is destined for a mug, fabric, a piece of wood, or an art print before I put brush to paper.
These leaves started as exactly that kind of experiment.
What became more interesting was looking at them all together afterward and realizing how many possibilities were sitting on my table.
From Watercolor Leaves to Digital Motifs
Because I painted the leaves separately, I can scan each one, preserve the original watercolor, and turn the paintings into digital motifs, and that’s where this little study suddenly gets a lot more interesting.
Once they’re scanned, I can remove the paper background and begin arranging the leaves in completely different ways. A group of individual paintings can become a composition for an art print. I can scatter them across a background for phone wallpaper, experiment with them in a seamless repeat, arrange a few vertically for a bookmark, or use the original shapes as inspiration for line art.
The original paintings don’t have to change at all. Instead, I’m taking something created traditionally and giving myself a digital box of leaves to play with.
That overlap between traditional and digital work is becoming one of my favorite parts of what I’m doing with Wild Ridge Studio. I don’t feel particularly interested in choosing between watercolor, pyrography, drawing, and surface pattern design. I’m much more interested in seeing what happens when one process feeds the next.
And Then the Wild Ridge Field Kit Happened
While I was painting these, I had also been thinking about creating something free for people who join my Wild Ridge Studio email list. I didn’t want another generic downloadable guide that gets saved to a computer and promptly forgotten about.
I wanted it to feel like Wild Ridge, and voila these leaves gave me the answer. They’re becoming the foundation for the first Wild Ridge Field Kit, a free seasonal collection of printable and digital pieces inspired by the outdoors and the artwork I’m creating in the studio.
The first one will be the Autumn Edition: Leaves of Virginia.
I’m using these watercolor leaves to create a small collection that includes printable autumn art, an adult coloring page, a nature journaling page, a botanical bookmark, and fall phone wallpaper. One simple watercolor study suddenly has quite a few places to go.
Following the Work Instead of Forcing It
That’s probably my favorite part of this project. I didn’t sit down with a five-product plan and then paint leaves because I needed assets for it. I sat down to explore watercolor and make a simple study for fall. The other ideas came afterward.
I’m learning that I like working this way. Make the thing that interests me first. Scan it. Move it around. Try it somewhere else. Turn it into a pattern. Burn a version into wood. Add watercolor. Make a print. Maybe make something completely unexpected.
The original artwork remains the original artwork, while the ideas keep moving. And right now, these little watercolor leaves are just getting started.
The first free Wild Ridge Field Kit: Autumn Edition, Leaves of Virginia, is coming soon. It will include printable art and creative pieces inspired by this watercolor study, so you can bring a little bit of the changing Virginia woods home with you.
