Designing Experiment with Watercolour and Pressed Leaves

The one good thing about making terrariums is that it is alive, and anything alive requires construction and maintenance, where cutting off excess leaves during installation or during pruning off overgrown leaves is unavoidable.

But since this is my new project JUNK2GLORY - Everything has second chances

Nothing is first hand discarded. It has to be first reconsidered for its reusability.

So what can I make use of tiny trimmed off Fittonia leaves?

Sewing that their "outstanding veins" are so unique and pretty, I kept it aside, pressed for several weeks, while waiting for inspiration.

Until recently, there has been a surge of YouTube short contents been popping in my feed teaching floral watercolour tips, which I am not really good at, seemed to be giving me a sign that I should give it a try and see the outcome.

Since last year I was blessed with this sketch book (where I gave one of them to an early dementia patient who loves to doodle), I went to acquire a student version of watercolour dry palettes and see if I could follow the simple tutorial to design something that I may be able to incorporate the pressed leaves as part of the design.

It wasn't super hard, neither was it easy. It took me a while to adjust the water consistency and to understand the paper texture, I managed to create this sample.

Using the pressed Fittonia leaves as the bigger leaves, the rest were drawn out immediately on the fly, then those leaves were carefully glued on the sketch.

What do you think?

Does look like a great idea for some simple hand drawn gift?