When Katie Brooks picked up a ginkgo leaf off the ground on her way to college back in 2018, she had no idea this tiny moment would change her life forever. In the years to come, she mastered the art of painting beautiful landscapes on dried leaves, blending her love for art and nature into one.
Brooks has been passionate about art since her childhood years, but it took some time before she found her true calling. She tried using other natural materials as a canvas, including feathers, stones, and seashells, but something clicked when she started experimenting with dried leaves.
“Working with real leaves feels like collaborating with the forest itself… I’m enamored by the idea of taking what would otherwise decay and make it timeless – taking stories, memories, and precious places and immortalizing them on a canvas grown from the very soil of that moment,” she wrote on her official website.
After deciding to quit her job to pursue art full-time, Brooks poured her soul into the 100 Painted Leaves Collection, painting a new leaf each day. She’s always looking for leaves with a broad, smooth surface that will let her paintings shine. Each of her tiny paintings requires a lot of time and patience because she chose to work with an incredibly delicate and fragile canvas, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
