Here's an old piece of mine. 

I wish I had written dates on all of my work because I'm having trouble placing this one. My best guess would be 2007-2008. Not that the date really matters. Shut up Seth, your readers don't want to hear your confused internal monologue! Just show them the piece!!

Okay, okay... here it is:

Autumn Leaves

11" by 17"
Gouache on Paper
Seth Tomlinson, 2007 or 2008... probably. What the hell do I know?

Sorry, it's not the best quality photo ever. But I can't seem to find the original, so this is what we're stuck with!

The Process

I'm diving back into the mind of teenage Seth and trying to remember what he did to paint this.

I began with a warm-colour wash of the entire page. I must have done something to texture that wash. You can see it in areas like this: 

I'm not sure what my method was... sorry. I probably just pressed a crinkled piece of paper over my watercolour paper as the wash was drying. 

After that I sketched out the design lightly with pencil. I painted another layer inside the leaves to darken the areas not occupied by veins, so you can see that the veins are lighter. 

I then painted layer after layer of orange, yellow, and red around the leaves. I only painted the negative space to define the shapes. During this step, I had to be very careful about which leaves were in the foreground and which were behind. I wouldn't want to wash additional layers onto the leaves at the front. The less paint they had, the lighter they would be and the more they would pop. The darker leaves recede into the background. 

As a finishing touch, I painted some dark berries using the more traditional method of painting the positive space.

Thanks for reading and looking. I hope you enjoyed it!

~Seth