Watercolor Pencils Part Two

I got up early this morning to play tennis so I prepped a new index card before I ran off.  Today I'm trying The Frugal Crafter's technique of pre-wetting the background and then brushing the color from the pencil directly onto the brush and then smushing it haphazardly around the paper.  This gives a very soft undefined color wash to the background.  I drew a leaf (following some techniques I learned here) and then applied the color wash around my drawing.  The take-away I got from the leaf tutorial was to draw the spine of the leaf first. It worked!  So here's my unpainted leaf and colorwash background:

Once I got home I got to work on watercoloring the leaf with the pencil.  This time I applied the pencil to the dry paper and went over my strokes with a wet brush.  Then it was trial and error while I tried to add detail and shading.  Sometimes I drew directly on the leaf (drying the paper occasionally with my heat tool) and sometimes I applies the watercolor to my brush first.  I didn't achieve what I had in my head (always the problem!) but it doesn't look too bad.  I couldn't quite get the shading right and the vein detail isn't consistent on each half of the leaf.  But I like my leaf shape and I thought the shadowing was pretty good.  And I like the softness of the background.  I think I'll check out some more video tutorials and try a leaf again tomorrow.