Trees on Foraged Grounds

As I have mentioned, when making watercolours there’s always some left over in the mortar and I like to use this to prepare grounds for future work. These are some recent earths, on the poundland paper which I use for cheap expreimenting.

These were inspired by the sketch I did of the pine tree over the road recently. The poundland paper is very spongy – not ideal for many things, but it has it’s uses in certain applications. Even with the earths well and truly soaked in it takes the paint in an very interesting manner – really diffusing into soft background shapes.

I worked on these in that manner first, and then re-wet to overpaint some further lines. After this I used some pigment sticks – like large versions of watercolour pencils to draw in more defined lines and pick up the texture of the earths on the paper. At all times I tried to work fast, almost by instinct rather than taking too long to consider where to place my marks.

I really like these as a set – there’s a soft and naive and almost Ghibli-esque quality to them in my mind.