Making leaves out of leaves

After my previous post on shaking paints with a Nail Lacquer Shaker I thought I'd do another review/tutorial combo. In this case making leaves out of leaves. I'm planning to base a future army on autumn style bases. That would require leaves and these can really cripple your bank account if bought to scale. Luckily you can just press your own with the same tools scrapbookers use.

The pink and purple punches where cheap, the yellow punch works. 

I bought two of these for next to nothing on Aliexpress. The third was not cheap (it's the one that says PK-Pro on the bottom. After a quick first test the pink one should actually be binned as its leaf shape is way too big for the scale I work on (28mm heroic). The maple leaf one could work as these leaves are quite big, but - no surprise here - the PK-Pro one is the only one that really works for scale.

Paper can be used for leaves, but it is a lot of work.

Problem solved you could say, but you'd be wrong. Having a punch is step one, step two is finding out what to punch with it. I started out using regular printer paper. After punching through it I used thinned down paint to give it a bit of color and a quick wash with Army Painter Soft Tone to blend the sides and make the leaves look old. It works. But it was quite a lot of work and it doesn't work as well as I'd want to. So back to the drawing board.

Let's try something new, enter the garden and pick a few different leaves.

As a second step I picked up different colors of leaf in my garden and around the hamlet I currently live. I used the PK-Pro punch to punch out the leaf and let the residue dry on a piece of paper.

Clean punch after use.

After that I was rather curious if it would turn brown overnight or keep its color.

The leaves after drying for a night.

So far so good, but what about over time?

The leaves after a month (the yellow ones are from a yellow leaf not pictured above).

Here is the mix almost a month later. The mix consists of the leaves pictured earlier and some yellow leaves I added. My conclusion: the best material to make leaves is leaves.

And we have a new basing material handy.

And here is the magical leaf mix in use on the base of my necromancer.