Mist and Verdure

Mist and Verdure
Size: 3x5 inches
Medium: Watercolors

A mini-offering. My painting-time these days has been so limited that I hoard every bit of it and spend days brainstorming a piece, sketching it out, pondering color schemes, before finally setting brush to paper. The thing is, it's mentally exhausting doing that, and I felt the need today to just let loose and paint something without over-thinking or planning. Sketch to finish, a couple of hours. Scribbled directly onto the board and then liberally doused with green washes and Essence of Oakland.

A walk through the redwoods today helped as well. I went hunting blackberries. Finding blackberries in Joaquinn Miller reserve is not hard. Finding the ripe ones is the trick. There are parts of the paths where there are literally 6-foot walls of blackberry bramble-hedges.

It was misty this morning, a cloudy haze that softened the upper branches of the redwoods. The leaves were shiny with condensation, and the blackberries were bright exclamations of tart red and glinting ebony amongst so much grey-green. Mist and verdure, to curl through my memory into a splash of color on my page this evening.