Travelling sketchbooks - misty mornings

As the year progresses, it's very chilly in the morning, but the extremely mild winter has meant a riot of early flowering bulbs. Daffodils, crocus, primroses; I wonder what will be left for April..

Nevertheless, misty mornings remain and my daily trips out of the countryside towards the metropolis mean undulating landscape laid out below the winding road and, if conditions are right, banks of low-lying mist, sometimes brushed with gentle early sunbeams touching treetops across the valley.

This must have been just below the surface of my conscious mind when I got the recent travelling sketchbook.

B, who loves whimsicality had gifted me pages of Rapunzel's flowing hair with witches clutter stuck into it. It curled up and down the pages pushing itself into every nook and cranny!

I started to think about other things that swirled atmospherically, that might mean something to me:  wisps of bonfire smoke rising in a helix, closely intertwined snakes and rather more ethereally, the morning mist, settled in layers in the stark winter valley bottom close by.

So first I did a quick sketch coloured with my Inktense pencils, the first remembered impressions indicating where I might be headed.

Then I decided that watery coloured paper might be quite nice with white spaces for the low-lying cloud. I cut random landscape-ish strips of cartridge paper and sloshed it with the dying embers of watercolour paint from the unwashed mixing trays in my palette to give graduated colour. The lumps and bumps are supposed to give a nod to trees and other shapes hardly emerging from the landscape.

 

Then I had a go with paint sample strips, cutting them up and reassembling them and then dabbing them with gesso 'mist'. Hmm..not so successful that one.

 

So I went back to more slosh-coloured paper. The speckles are residual paint from the undersheets that I was working on and I liked the effect so I left it.

This was in the travelling sketchbook that I had started and that I will get back at the end. We all got our 'own' sketchbooks back on this pass. I wondered if this idea had been too simple, but I liked the idea that I would at some point have the original back. That seemed a good enough reason to conclude that, simple or not, it was the right piece to pass on.