How to paint Grape Leaves

Leaves make wonderful little frames in paintings. They add contrast, texture and color. Especially with grapes.
There are different varieties of grape leaves, which I’m not going to go into here. I just want to show you a couple of easy ways to sketch your leaves and then fill in with paint. You might want to sketch your leaf patterns first and transfer them to your painting.
First, you want your leaves to have a little curve. I started with 2 little lines.


Then paint a longer curved line. This will be the main ‘vein’.

Then add 2 more, shorter lines.

Now make little upside-down ‘u’s in between each line. Then you’re going to connect all the little u’s.
Don’t worry about your lines matching mine. They can curve any which way. Real leaves do. They bend and curve all over the place.
I drew the squiggly lines just for effect. You don’t need to draw those, transfer them and then try and paint each little one. Really all you need to transfer is the curved lines and the u’s. This will give you all you need to paint a full leaf.
You can also curve leaves the opposite way. I’ll post a full tutorial on Paint It Yourself!

I basecoated these leaves with yellow. I wanted a warmer green. Use green or yellow as your base – it doesn’t matter.

Apply a coat of medium green. I used Ceramcoat Leaf Green. You still see the yellow peeking thru.

Remember those little curved lines we started with? Paint them in with yellow and watch the leaf ‘come to life.’

I added some additional yellow highlighting, just to add another layer of dimension.

Finally add a topcoat of Leaf Green. You’ll still see some of the yellow highlights under the topcoat. I also added the little squiggly that shoot out from grape vines.
Hope you give these a try. We’ll be painting more grapes for fall & Thanksgiving projects.
I’m posting all of my tutorials at my new site Paint It Yourself! Hope you stop by for a visit!
Colleen