I’d been painting mushrooms all week and this was a good chance to work on something a little larger and less complex. I also wanted to complete a painting with a background.

As you can see its a nice simple sky wash and a super cool bent tree, which really spoke to me. I must have taken about 40 photos of this one unusual tree.

The ground was painted by wetting the paper and painting with a wet brush with a very small amount of paint on it.

Then a few grass tuffs were added to simulate distance.

I’m trying out some of this low tack tape to give the water colour a nice crisp white edge once removed. Hopefully this will stop the paper from warping too.

More grass tuffs were added and then some shadows and finally some ground litter, twigs, stones.

Next I covered up the sky with a sheet of paper and then used my stippling brush to flick paint over the lower half of the painting to look like dirt.

I rather like the simplicity of this painting because it shows the vast expanse of open space and flat terrain of the Australian bush.

It also feels good to fill the watercolour paper with colour.

About a month later I decided to revisit this painting as it just didn’t seem to be balanced and was also lacking an animal which is common in most of my paintings. So I feel the addition of an emu is just what was needed to make this painting a little more Australian and I saw a few just down the road.

Hopefully whoever purchases this will love the new addition of the emu.