Colour Shading Again

I have managed to get myself to the part of the country that has the rest of my embroidery silks in it and have been carrying on with the autumn leaves panel. This has involved some unpicking since I decided that I wanted to original leaf I started with to be predominantly yellow and far more gradually shaded than my initial attempts had been. I have therefore been using multiple needles with different coloured threads to help avoid mistakes when I am shading between colours:

Actually, I appear to be getting better at counting on evenweave fabric and while using blackwork stitch patters as I am making far fewer mistakes of that type. Which is a very good thing as I have found that the best way to create the kind of gradual shift in colour I want is to have continual shading with no sections that are completely one colour. The picture bellow shows the completed leaf in better light:

Although there is a general trend towards yellow, some parts shade into green and some are orange. But rather than differentiating between the areas I wanted to be different colours when I was sewing I took a very fluid approach. That explanation wasn't very clear so maybe a close up will help:

There are seven different coloured threads in the above image, not including the black outline, but they all overlap so much that you have to concentrate hard to see where one starts and the next begins. This allows for very quick but smooth graduations in colour. The trick seems to be to not have even a single repetition of the pattern in a single colour. Where there are no sections that are identifiably one colour it becomes easier for the eye to accept the transition to the next one as there is simply no dividing line, however blurred.

As you can see in the first picture above, I started on a second leaf while I had the limited selection of threads that is going to be much darker than the first. However, the problem I had with the colour on that was the opposite one to with the first. The red/orange patch that has been sewn above contained three different coloured threads but unless you look closely it is virtually impossible to tell them apart. In the image bellow I have done some unpicking and introduced some lighter colours to help:

This is better but the use of only five colours of thread still seems quite limited. I think I will need to add something even darker to give this one the variation in colour it needs. The main thing I have learnt from this exercise so far is that colour is really very complicated!