A PAINTING A DAY

I saw a painting Michael Naples did a while ago. The one with the leaf tapped to the wall, and I really thought this was a nice idea to hold the leaf in place while painting it. Lets face it, not all the leafs can just lean on a wall, so this is quite useful. So I wanted to paint my own version. I went out a couple of weeks ago to get some leaves out of our maple trees right in front of my house. They were bloody red! gorgeous colors! so I tapped one down on my white paper wall (the one for my photograph setting) Of course I'm not using fancy tape, because the only thing I have in my studio is packing tape, the brown one, transparent or the one from the post office, so I had to improvise and use a little strip of the brown one. Is not as neat, but I think it looks good plus I like the reflections of light on it. I set up a nice warm lamp to cast a nice shadow. Not too dark and not too light, so I adjusted the distance of the light from the leaf to get shadow I liked best. I like my shadows to be strong, crisp as that gives tons of warm light sensation, and that's what I'm going for 99% of the times. I used to paint tons of night scenes when I was single, but lets face it, 3 kids and a husband latter who on earth has time to go out at night? =]