Embroideries based on photo walk and sketches. Part five. Leaves as blocks of colour.

Three of the pictures I took on this walk were of quite dense groupings of leaves. This is the second of those pictures. As I've probably said before, I was given quite a substantial collection of embroidery silks, and have quite a lot of scrap fabric I'm trying to use up. I thought that using another scrap of velvet, as I did in part two of this series, this time in black, would create a good contrast to the smooth surfaces of the 'leaves'. Here is the reference:

I thought I would be a little less strict, and try and use my satin stitches in different ways to create the leaves. By less strict, I mean that I used the basic outlines of some leaves from my reference photo, but made no effort to copy it. I'm quite pleased with the result. Using so many stitches grouped so closely together, however, meant that the fabric was beginning to weaken at the edges of some of the more densely stitched leaves - so I thought I would stop here. A larger study, perhaps of a single leaf in silk shading, on such a background, would be a good next step.