Before I went off to do my errands today, I slopped some paint on my watercolor block. I wet the entire paper, then washed with ultramarine rose and ultramarine blue: a streak of blue and a circle of rose. In between errands, I stopped home and filled in the circle with blue and overpainted the blue wash with more ultramarine blue.  Since I am in a salty mood these days (see posts from yesterday and the day before), I sprinkled some pretzel salt on the newly-wet areas.

I went out again. It was a beautiful day here. I was attracted to the textures of bark on two different trees, and made photographs:

 

I returned to my painting to find that the filled-in ultramarine rose outline could serve as the scar in ‘Tree Bark Example 2’.

I glazed the ultramarine blue streak with lemon yellow and made earth-tone stripes to resemble the bark of ‘Tree Bark, Example 1’.

The resulting watercolor is a hybrid of bark textures. The glazed ultramarine blue could be the inner workings of my mythical tree.

I was very pleased that I was able to include the patterns I discovered during the day into the watercolor I started before I even saw them.