12. Golden Autumn Leaves
Autumn leaves offer a brilliant playground for warm color blending. You can collect a few leaves from your yard to use as templates, tracing their shapes lightly with a pencil. Using shades of mustard yellow, burnt orange, and deep crimson, you fill in the leaf shapes, letting the warm colors bleed into one another on the paper. To make the leaves look realistic, you can drop a tiny bit of brown or olive green onto the tips to simulate natural weathering. Once dry, use a fine detail brush to add delicate, branching veins across the surface.