To make my marked background, I used natural inks and black water colour to link in with the colours I painted my natural object with. I thought a black background would be a nice contrast to the bright colours I used, and my natural ink was the Inspo for my colour pallette. I used brushes, a twig and a cotton pads to make a variety of marks and patterns. I kept the patterns simple and mainly used lines or dots.
When photographing my leaves on the backgrounds, I tried to pair them up based on contrasting and complimenting colours. Some backgrounds made the leaves really pop, but others just didn’t look right.
I found it hard to get very accurate drawings of my leaves, as many of them had five or six colours which were hard to capture with black ink. On my first set of drawings, I added a wash of coffee or beetroot juice to some of the leaves to add depth to the drawings. I think the composition of my drawings are really nice, and they both automatically look like patterns.
I found the loose drawings a lot easier to do, as it was nice to not worry about capturing the natural object exactly, and I just used the colour to add depth instead of representing the colours
Second Best Dressed 
Leave a Reply