The colors are everywhere!

Our back yard is red and green right now. The Japanese maple branches are red, the begonia has leaves that are red on the back and green on the front, the heavenly bamboo has red berries and green leaves, and the middle smaller maple is solidly red all over.

If you click on the picture to the left you can see a larger screen of the picture. It's worth looking at it that way, in order to see the color details.

Around town Bradford pears and sweet gum trees are blasting color. These two trees are at the edge of our grocery store's parking lot.
How about these trees? They are just outside of the library where I work. It amazes me that one tree can have so many colors all at once.
The trees remind me of the sponge paintings of trees that we used to do as kids in elementary school.

The teacher would have us color or ink a bare tree, and then we would be given chunks of torn sponge, which we could dip into blobs of red, yellow, orange and green tempera paint.

The paint loaded sponge would then be touched to the paper, leaving the holes of the sponge blank, and producing a perfect replica of the dotted fall leaf pattern so similar to these trees.

I don't think any of those kinds of painting every came out less than fabulous, even when done by the least artistic child in the class. I wonder what brilliant teacher first dreamed up that project.