Fall Leaf Collection

Digital illustrations based on collected leaf specimens.

2026

11/2018 to 4/2023

digital illustration; selected works printed on unfinished wood

Reflective Artistic Self-Analysis

In the fall of 2018, I found myself completely enamored with the changing fall colors around me. The leaves were so visually captivating that they nearly became a driving hazard.

My practice often develops through intense periods of focus on a single subject from nature. When I become fixed on something, I want to spend time artistically exploring its intricacies to respect its beauty. That is why I am so drawn to working in series. A series becomes a living exploration, allowing one piece to build momentum for the next.

From the beginning, Fall Leaf Collection was always intended to be a series. I kept picking up leaves that caught my attention around campus and pressing them into my textbooks, feeling compelled to preserve them even before I fully knew what I would do with them. This collection became a way to give those leaves the attention they seemed to demand.

Each work begins with the collection of an individual leaf. The leaf is pressed, photographed, lightly edited, and documented before being reinterpreted in Adobe Illustrator. Even when pressed, leaves lose much of their color over time. Through photography and illustration, I captured and preserved the moment that first drew me to each specimen.

The series moved through three visual iterations between 2021 and 2023. While the style evolved, the motivation stayed the same: to continue exploring the same subject in a way that kept the process rewarding and creatively fresh.

Earth Day Exhibition | Kenosha Creative Space

Iteration One: Naturalistic

The naturalistic iteration formed the core of my 2021 senior thesis. Each work began with a leaf collected on campus, briefly pressed, photographed, and cataloged before I manually reconstructed its shape, pigmentation, imperfections, and subtle color changes in Adobe Illustrator. The first twelve completed pieces were printed on unfinished wood blocks, which became my preferred final presentation for the collection.

As the series continued beyond my thesis, I created many more naturalistic leaves than I had the opportunity to print. These unprinted digital works remain an important part of the collection and document its most sustained and meticulous phase—when my goal was to preserve each specimen so closely that viewers sometimes mistook the illustrations for photographs.

Available upon request or printed on demand. Prices vary depending on the size and availability starting at $30.

Iteration Two: Quilted / Patchwork

33 Specimens

After completing dozens of naturalistic leaves, I began looking for a way to keep the series fresh. The shift came as I became more interested in the heart veins of the leaves, which I found especially rewarding to work with as a way of breaking up the color in a new way.

Rather than tracing every small change in pigmentation, I began using the veins as the underlying structure of the composition. This created a style that feels somewhere between a quilt and stained glass, while still remaining rooted in the original leaf. The colors and shapes were still drawn directly from each specimen, but the process became more graphic and interpretive.

The change was not about abandoning realism so much as sustaining the series. After spending extreme amounts of time on highly detailed leaves, I needed a new visual language that would allow me to keep exploring the collection without repeating the exact same process.

Iteration Three: Lineage

6 Specimens

The final phase of the collection pushed the vein-based approach even further. In these later works, I removed much of the filler and relied almost entirely on the veins themselves. What remained was a more stripped-down and linear interpretation of the leaf, emphasizing its internal structure over its surface.

I only worked in this style briefly. By that point, my fixation on leaves was beginning to fade, and the series was naturally nearing its end. Even so, the Lineage pieces mark the final stage of the collection’s evolution, reducing the leaf to its most essential framework.