Autumn leaf

To explore the red/orange/yellow/green combination which has been causing trouble I decided to ignore blue and purple which are straight forward and have another go focusing on just those four. Given my musing at the end of yesterday's post I also wanted to move away from the rectangular shading experiments into something more fluid that would better reflect how I might want to ultimately use the colors and, since the colours are all vaguely autumnal, decided a stylised autumn leaf would be good. The idea is not to provide a realistic image but to shade the colours randomly within the prescribed outline. All the leafs I have done so far were basically the same shape so this one is different:

It also had the added benefit of forcing me to practice sewing gradual curves which I am still not all that good at. I chose the large 'lace' stitch pattern to keep it very stylised and used 5 thread colours (red, dark orange, light orange, yellow, and green) all with a single strand. Here is the result:

The difference between the light and dark orange doesn't really show up, I should have used a darker shade of green and the bottom left section is too light by comparison with the others but I still really like it. The lack of smooth transitions isn't a problem because the changes in colour are so quick that it isn't necessary and I love how bold and colourful it looks. I think I will come back to this when I design my first coloured blackwork piece.