The art challenge for week 44 of the Documented Life Project was to: “Incorporate leaves (real or drawn/painted) onto your page in a creative way.”

Jan:

Last spring I bought some new plants for a flower garden and was fascinated with the look of the leaves on the herb plant with the funny name of Rue. I had never heard of it or seen it. I was told by the clerk it was a plant that helped ward off mosquitoes, so I was sold! It grew but never produced the small yellow flowers shown on the card that came with it. Maybe they don’t grow in the first year. Here it is in my flower bed. Since I have recently done other challenges using leaves (here, and here, and here, and here), I wanted to do something different to do with these leaves.

While watching my grandkids play outside, I started sketching some sprigs of my rue plant with pencil. I then colored them with watercolor pencils and used a black fine point Pitt pen to draw around the leaves. For the final touch, I brushed the back of the rue sprigs with mod-podge and stuck them onto the page. I covered the whole page and the tops of the leaves with a final coat of mod-podge to help preserve the leaves.

Melinda:

I recently had a birthday, and My Hubby gave me one of the best presents I could get, a whole day to do whatever I wanted! So in the afternoon, I took about 45 minutes at the local coffee shop and worked on some drawing. I didn’t want to draw a normal tree leaf, so I started looking through pinterest for some inspiration. I thought about Basil because it is one of my favorite herbs. I found a picture of a tomato, Mozzarella, and Basil appetizer. In one of the Derwent Academy challenges, I had to draw a shell using just dots, called stippling or pointillism. I thought it would be a good challenge for me to try doing that again with this drawing. (Gotta love when you realize you have a typo after you’ve already taken a picture. Mozarella, mozzarella. I always get that one wrong.)