This painting has an interesting story behind its creation. I started this with a blue and green background beautifully blended and with little textures. Then I started painting few of these leaves. The plan was to stick to greens and blues, but I got carries away and kept adding different hues of both colors and then shifted towards purples and pinks as well. As i kept building layers of leaves on top of each other, I started realizing that the background was almost blending into my leaves and it was a very muted painting. As you know, I love that subtle vibrancy in my paintings, and somehow the background kept bothering me, while the leaves were getting outrageous with my new red addition :).
I realized that a darker background would have made the painting look much better, but it seems it was too late to redo the entire painting. I had already giving a couple of days to this. I experimented with adding black color in one tiny space to see if that can be a good option, and yes, I loved it. The entire background was painted as if I was painting the actual subject, I looked for those tiny shapes and spaces behind the leaves and started covering them up with black. It really took many more days to finish, but at the end I feel it was all worth the effort.