Katie Brooks fell in love with the delicate nature of leaves and found a way for their beauty to echo through eternity. This landscape artist from North Carolina found her true calling when she started using leaves as her canvas for her magical miniature works of art.
Brooks has enjoyed collecting leaves for as long as she can remember, and her childhood notebooks were filled with them. She’s always been a creative soul and worked in galleries and classrooms where she was constantly surrounded by art, but it took a while for her to summon the courage to create her own.
Brooks’s signature project “100 Painted Leaves Collection” helped her rediscover her love for art. It involved painting a leaf each day for 100 days, and this growing collection helped her solidify her path as an artist.
Brooks’ artistic process starts with choosing leaves in the forest near her home in North Carolina, and it takes about a month for them to dry before she’s ready to prep them with acrylic gesso and get to painting.
“The leaves I paint are chosen based on a number of factors. Typically, I’m looking for sturdy, intact leaves with a good shape for my composition. However, sometimes the leaf itself determines the composition, especially if the location it comes from is part of the piece!” she writes on her official website.
