Once upon a time...

A few weeks ago as I was leaving my watercolor class with a couple of other students, one of them stopped and pointed to a tree, "Look at that!" she said. I turned around and saw a rusty old wheel in the crook of the tree. It had obviously been there a long time as the tree had grown around it.

I have passed by this tree dozens of times and never seen this before! (It makes me wonder how much else I have missed...) "There is a painting", I thought - I took a picture of it.

I have also been intrigued by some 'rivulet' paintings that I had recently seen. Perhaps I could do a rivulet painting of the old wheel.

The rivulet technique is one is which you begin by doing a drawing on watercolor paper. Then the paper is wet and a raw umber is applied. I covered the paper with a raw umber wash and then dabbed on some heavier blobs of the raw umber pigment.

Next, while the paper is still pretty wet, I held the painting up vertically and sprayed the whole thing so that the rivulets began to form. This takes a little while, but the texture is really amazing.

Here are some close ups - 

The next steps are to add various washes to define the picture and then lift some of the paint to capture the highlights and, for this picture, to identify the old wheel. 

"Once upon a time there was a cart..."   11x 14 watercolor $225

So, there you have it - interesting technique, texture and story...although the story has yet to be written. I don't have a clue as to how or why the wheel got into the tree. I/we need to make up something great and write a book about it!