My realistic watercolor: Trapped in - how I painted it?

During my walks, I take a lot of photos with my smartphone for inspiration. I love the details, the depths, the play of light and shadows.
Then I look through the pictures at home and choose one and paint from that. The essence is always precisely worked out, the background is a little hazy and blurred. The falling leaves are easily trapped on the wire fences, and the way the setting sun shines through them is wonderful.

I made a small modification to my painting: I also painted a tree trunk on the right side to frame the view, so as to emphasize the leaf in the middle.

You can compare it with the original photo, it's almost the same, yet very different.
I could paint it photo-realistically, but what would be the sense in that? Much better to capture an autumnal mood!

I started by drawing the picture. In this case I copied it because I didn't want to spend a lot of time on it. I darken the room and put the paper on the monitor, with the JPG photo behind it. I draw the main lines with a soft pencil and then add more details if necessary.
At first, as usual, I wanted to give it an irregular frame, but as I went along I didn't like it, so I went all the way to the edge of the picture, to the tape to fix it.

I dampened the background (except for the leaves) and added the splashes of color - the sky, leaves, grass below and the distant tree line, all flowing into each other.

The wooden leaf and the trunk on both sides were also given a base.

I went layer by layer and of course worked out the leaf in as much detail as possible.
I also added a strong contrast to the wire fence.

See the closer details and the deepness of the background.

The leaf is a bit translucent, so you can see part of the wire line behind it, which casts a brownish shadow from the other side.

You can't see it in the picture, but I didn't use black to paint the wire fence, just a mixture of sepia and dark purple. I added a little dark purple to the darkest parts afterwards. Why not use black for the black parts? Because when it dries, it becomes a faded dark grey.