Trees

A bit of catching up needed before my scheduled posts expire! Yes, that's my secret. I write my posts in advance and schedule them for publishing. Which means my life runs on three tracks. 1 real life, 2. blog life, 3 Instagram life, which is generally at least 2 or 3 weeks behind. It's confusing. To me anyway. 

So as I'm looking at these trees and the granulation I've created, I think, oooh, I like that. I must do that again! Because it happened at least a week ago (or a month ago if you're following on Instagram).

But yes, I'm still doing Dolores Phelps's online course Wild Watercolour. And for this lesson, we were playing with encouraging granulation in our trees. This first one is done in watercolour. Fairly granulating pigments. I threw a lot of pigments at it: Green Apatite Genuine, Monte Amiata Natural Sienna, Burnt Umber, Ultramarine Blue, Violet Raw Umber and that purple mix I made the other day. Plus lots of water of course. And because I don't like painting from pure imagination, I used a photo of a tree in Kenmare as a starting point!

And then I did the exercise in gouache. I don't have Prussian Blue, so I mixed Dark Indigo and Turquoise Blue. One is Schmincke, the other Holbein. Plus lots of water. It was quite sunny today, and warm in my little room, so it was drying quite fast. I had to keep adding paint!