Magic In the Mud

"One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well." Vincent van Gogh

This is either the coolest...or the strangest thing I've seen this fall.  I'm going with cool....totally cool!  Are they little insects?  But they look like tiny little acorns embedded in the leaf.  

I've never really had the confidence to mix my own paint colors.  I tend to buy a lot of different colors....then just tweak them a bit for my printing.  But following along with the first lesson in Fodder School 2 by Rebecca Sower (yes, the same artist I just took the "Winter Tree" class from) I jumped right in mixing colors.  And....this was the first time I actually used my pallet knife...which I've had for a long time.  

I used just three colors and a black and a white to make all these solids. (and there's more)  I needed something from the primary family...red, yellow, and blue. These were not the typical choices...but it's what I had in the more heavy bodied paints.

I can't share too much about the process....because this was a paid class...but I can say that I would never have guessed that the magic was in the mud.  Mud is what you get when you mix all the colors together....and a little mud it is what unified all my mixed colors together.   

Mud...is also how you get lighter and darker neutrals...which I need to make more of next time. I was having too much fun with the colors.

The next step is to add some texture and patterns to these papers.....

...but first....I'm going to make some leaf and grass prints! I've been wanting to do this for months!