Making pictures from paint splodges!

I’ve always been a fan of painting and drawing exercises to loosen up my work. This is a technique I’ve hit upon to look at some colours other than my usual palette (greens & blues if you hadn’t noticed!) and also improve my pen and ink line work.

To create this sketch I took my sketchbook and paints out into the garden and sat next to an orange tree, I soaked the surface of the paper with clean water and then painted orange and green ‘splodges’ wet in wet onto the paper, allowing the paint pools to move and bump into each  other in happy accidents. Its not entirely abstract as I was deliberately trying to make round orange shapes and elongated strokes for the leaves, but abstract enough for my purposes.