In this spread, I made a few pitiful attempts to sketch. I'm always preaching to calligraphy students that they must practice, practice in order to increase their skills; but I fail to take my own advice when it comes to drawing. I admire those who can do it with seeming ease, but I'm sure they had to work at it. And that's what I don't do with drawing...so how do I expect to get any better at it? I used to draw constantly when I was a child, and thought I was pretty good back then. Somewhere along the way, I stopped.
These two pages came about when I was playing around with my new bottles of Golden fluid acrylics. I mixed some yellow oxide with a few drops of Rotring gold, and diluted it with water. The right hand page was painted with diluted phthalo blue. While I still had some of the blue in my brush, I dipped it into the yellow oxide mixture, and swooshed it around on the yellow background. Ah, ha! instant plant! So I defined the leaves a bit with a black pen, and gave them some depth and texture with Prismacolor pencils. That wasn't too painful.
By this time, the blue page had dried rather streakily, and I began to see shapes that resembled a landscape, which I outlined with my pen. Added some green and brown to the trees and heat-embossed a crescent moon in the sky. I don't think Van Gogh should be worried!
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