This page was the first I created for the book. It was well below freezing for a few days, and I remembered painting outside with a friend during a freeze when she was cramming to finish art school deadlines. To our surprise, the watercolor captured the forms of the ice in the paint as they dried. If you look closely at this piece you can see where the ice crystals grew and some rough-looking spots where frost formed. I’ve added two extra photos to show it more closely.
The piece also features rubbings of cedar branch tips with crayon over the painted trees.
If you’ve got some paint, this is a fun thing to try. (If you’re willing to suffer the cold!) It needs to be well below freezing to work well, and softer paper, such as cotton heavy watercolor paper seems to work better than the sketchbook pages, but you can see the idea. Let the paper dry fully before bringing it in from the cold. If you have any puddles that froze, you may want to bring the temperature up gradually so it doesn’t melt and run. Have fun! And if you post something, please put a link in comments here–I’d love to see how it works for you.
Page three and four:
sheri j kennedy ~ Riverside 