Leaf of Gold study

I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out. It's a study of a Walter Phillips watercolour painting. Sometimes I don't know what to paint so I spend more time not doing anything than painting. I'm going to "study" other paintings a lot more. It gives me a chance to practice technique at the very least. Sometimes the study looks nothing like the original, so in those cases the original paintings are more like muses and it's probably fine to collect royalties from my work. This work looks an awfully like the Phillips painting, so I won't put it up.

To make this one, I sketched the mountains, cloud, lake and tree branch with a watercolour pencil crayon. Then I applied resist over the leaves and let it dry. Painted the sky, mountains, and lake and let it dry completely. Painted the branch and waited again. Finally I removed the resist and painted the leaves.

Some issues I have with the work include: the pencil crayon used was dark and it stained pretty good. I wish the outline of the mountains wasn't visible. The various layers of mountain rock is a great feature of the original that is missing here. As are ripples in the lake. Also the silhouette of the foothill trees is pretty rough and somewhat haphazard in my study. I should have found something finer to paint with. 

So I learned a thing or two. Hopefully the issues with my next painting will be mostly new ones.