November

Leaves in the autumn came tumbling down,
Scarlet and yellow, russet and brown,
Leaves in the garden were swept in a heap,
Trees were undressing ready for sleep.
-Author Unknown

Here's my EDM challenge #145, "A Tree in Autumn". It's with watercolor and colored pencil in my Aquabee sketchbook done from memory of a view I see almost daily when driving back home from town. Unfortunately my paper became a little too wet and of course my 9 x 12 inch sketchbook barely fits on my scanner, so I apologize for the poor quality scan.

"A Tree in Autumn" was not an easy task for me here this week. At the start of the week Autumn packed its bags and left our part of the mountains and Winter wasted no time moving right in. After a few days of cold drizzle we had snow flurries on Thursday and into Friday, temps in the 20s and winds gusting over 50 miles an hour. Ah, November. But on Wednesday all was calm in the late afternoon while driving home. With heavy blue-gray clouds overhead the sun was low and casting a warm light on the surrounding hillsides and all the remaining russet leaves were glowing in the November light. That is what I tried to capture here from memory.

I love the colors of November probably more than any other month. You can see at the bottom of my sketch my color swatches in watercolor. Gray-blue skies, sap green hills waving ochre grasses, bare purple branches dancing beside fully clothed pines and russet leaves shining like a new penny in the low November light. As I was driving home on Wednesday with kiddo in the backseat, I was reminded of a poem we had read for her school work that described "russet" colored leaves. At the time I had given her an explanation of what "russet" was, but now we could experience the russet leaves in a marvelous glowing light.