I had another experimental painting that I used textured gesso and then applied paint.

It looks pretty boring here for sure. But some of the textures looked like rocks. So I sketched in the rock shapes with pencil.

I then added water colors to create the rock shapes. So far so good. The gesso textures really helped to give the rocks some character. But now I decided I needed to add water and make it look like a river bed with water flowing over and around the rocks. Uh oh, now I would need to figure out how to paint water. I watched several Youtube videos and printed out some photos of river beds in Montana. The rock colors are similar to what we have here.

I photocopied my rocks and then worked out how I wanted the water to flow over the rocks. So far so good. But I needed some underwater rocks. These needed to look more hazy and not as defined as the surface rocks.

So here are the added underwater rocks. I just made them sort of fuzzy shapes with indistinct edges. Since this is all in water color over a base of acrylic paint, the watercolor comes right off if you get it wet. So I needed to spray it with a fixative so that I could continue to work over the top and add the water flowing. Of course, I don’t have any spray fixative. I tried to find it in four local stores and no luck. So I ordered it off of Amazon. Now I have to wait until next week to finish this piece. I guess that gives me more time to study flowing water and how to paint it!

Thanks for stopping by and have a good weekend.