A Face, A Wild Garden n Color, and an Abstract Landscape?

 Part of my art practice the last few days, besides my Magpie Nest and Piano Hinge journals, was in my W/N MM sketchbook.

A girl character from my imagination, sketched with a stablio pencil and water.

I tried a "wild" garden in color, in a variety of media and techniques. It wound up kind of busy, dense, and chaotic, but I had a total blast with it. Notice the little stamped cat at the bottom of the left side! Isn't he cute? He's actually the middle cat of a trio of cats stamp that I got in a supply swap years ago. I love the stamp!

This one started out with a dark grayish image across the bottom where some ink bled over from another page, leaving a couple of blobs and some stripes. I could see a dog's head image in the top blob, so I thought I could somehow turn it into a long dog across the end. I turned the book horizontally and sprayed the page lightly with water, added burnt sienna acrylic paint, then sprayed with water again and held the page up so that it ran down the page. I added a few grains of sea salt just before it dried, but I think it was a bit too dry already, because it didn't affect it much.

When it was good and dry I used India ink to make a striped dog with a tail, but it didn't look right, so I thought I would take some turquoise paint and turn it into a dog wrapped in a black and turquoise blanket and see how that went. I could always cut that end off and do something else with the rest of it. 

But when I turned it around to check it from different angles, I saw all these little silhouetted figures trudging across the page end, with a hill behind them and a bigger hill in front of them. Some had large bags on their backs and some had on head rags, and they all looked exhausted. I liked it, so I tweaked the hills a bit with ink and added a bit of turquoise colored pencil and left it alone. I didn't do anything else to the sky, because I really like all the little things going on in it at sunset. Who knew? I love it! 

Sometimes, if you pay attention, the painting creates itself and surprises you! Nobody else may like it, but I do, so it's perfectly fine!