Testing New Gear on a Drippy Meadow Landscape

Hi, I'm Valerie Englehart, and today I'm testing out a new piece of plastic I picked up for myself, bought specifically because I wanted to keep doing more of these drippy, granulating scenes that tend to make a big mess. My hope was that it would make handling the paper easier and maybe even keep my hands a little cleaner in the process.

Setting Up the Board

The board I'm using is about 12 by 16, and the paper is a 9 by 12 Watercolor XL by Canson — an inexpensive, student-grade paper. Honestly, this painting came out of a bit of frustration. I'd just had four failed experiments doing something completely different, and I was feeling moody about it, so I decided to redirect that energy into a meadow-inspired landscape instead.

Most of the piece is painted with colors from Rockwell Art. I started with Opal Yellow, a golden-brown color — and I'll say this about Rockwell Art: some of their color names definitely leave you guessing.

Building the Tree Line

My spritzer bottle is adjustable, which matters a lot here, since I can switch between a fine mist and a thicker stream depending on what I need. For the tree line, I used an oil fan brush I hadn't touched in ages — my daughter had taken it and it ended up buried in her papers until I found it again while cleaning.

When building a textured piece like this, you're working with the flow of the water, so you have to be mindful of the direction you want that flow to travel. Holding the brush at a different angle would have given me more horizontal lines, which actually would have looked great for a snowy bank, but wouldn't have worked for a tree line.

To break up that solid block of color, I sprinkled in a green called Onat Diamond Yellow. I love Rockwell Art's granulating paints — they're beautiful and genuinely fun to use, even if guessing what a color will actually look like based on its name is half the game. I squeeze the paint fresh from the tube onto a porcelain plate, which helps me catch as much of that pigment as possible.

For a little extra texture in the background, I added a small amount of salt in a couple of spots. One thing about this technique: a lot of that background texture is still forming as you work, and you won't know exactly what it looks like until much later.

Working the Foreground Grasses

In the foreground, I layered in more Onat Diamond Yellow along with a color called Fall Story, which has some orange tones that emerge as it splits, giving the foreground a bit more warmth. For the long grasses, I applied paint diagonally, then lifted, sprayed, and held the board at an angle to let it drip.

Patience is the real technique here. You'll need to hold your paper up for a full minute at a time and just let gravity do its work. It's genuinely hard, especially because if you don't see results right away, it's tempting to think you need more water. You probably don't — you probably just need to wait. That's something I have to keep reminding myself.

The oil fan brush turned out to be a great choice for this. It doesn't hold much water, and because it's built for thick, heavy oil paints, it does a great job of picking up a thick blob of tube pigment. Its thick, splayed bristles are also excellent for dragging pigment across the paper to build grassy texture. From there, it's mostly holding the board at one angle, letting it drip, then shifting to another angle and repeating.

Wetting Front and Back

To keep the paper stuck to my board, I simply wet it on both the front and back. That also keeps the paper wet longer, which matters for the next step: scraping.

I pulled out a palette knife to lift some paint and create highlighted grass. My first attempt didn't work — the paper was still too wet, and you won't get a good lift if it is. So I waited. That's the tradeoff with wetting front and back: it keeps the paper workable longer, which is great for some techniques, but for lifting, you need the paint to be drier, which means patience — and I'll admit, patience isn't exactly my strong suit.

Deepening the Values

Once I stepped back and squinted at my reference photo, I noticed everything was landing in the mid-tones. That's not necessarily a problem — it's fine, even good, to have a predominant tone — but if everything is equal mid-tone with no variation, the painting gets boring. So I went back in and added some darks.

I also let the paint in the foreground dry slightly before spritzing it again, since paint reacts differently once it's dried and then rewetted. This is usually how you get cauliflower blooms, which some watercolor artists avoid entirely and others, myself included, embrace with open arms.

Because Canson XL paper can get damaged fairly easily, I made sure this technique — applying pigment and then wetting it, rather than a lot of repeated brushing — worked in the paper's favor. If I'd tried to do 20 layers of glazing with a brush wiggling back and forth over and over, the paper would have started to pill. But by applying fresh, juicy paint into still-wet paper, the background softened over time into a lovely glow of trees.

Adding Sweet Peas

For a pop of contrast, I picked up a synthetic round brush (sticking with synthetic since it doesn't hold much water) and some Daniel Smith Rose Madder Permanent from a spare palette — pink being the opposite of green on the color wheel. My reference photo had a few sweet pea flowers in it, but since this is an abstract landscape viewed at a distance, I wasn't aiming for convincing, detailed sweet peas. I just wanted little pops of pink that suggest flowers.

Since that area of the paper was still wet, the pink diffused as soon as it touched down, which is why I made sure to pick up as thick a load of paint as possible from the palette first. I did a bit of lifting afterward to break up some of the lines.

Chasing a Feeling, Not a Memory

What I was really going for was the feeling of looking through tall grasses toward a line of trees — something that reminds me of hiking as a teenager. I grew up in a wooded area, and I'd often go exploring and stumble across clearings I never would have guessed were there: flowers, deer, an owl perched in a tree. It was genuinely magical.

I wasn't painting a specific memory here, and my reference photo actually came from a stock site, either Unsplash or Pexels. But that's the thing about references: you can absolutely draw on your own memories and feelings while still using a reference photo you find online, as long as you have permission to use it. For me, this painting was about capturing a feeling and having fun making a mess with color.

Finishing the Details

I switched to a rigger brush to add a few thin lines suggesting stems, since sweet peas have those delicate, viney stems, and I didn't want the pink to read as blobs floating in space. I held the brush way back at the handle, both to keep the strokes loose and to keep my hand from accidentally touching the wet paper.

As things dried a bit more, I added another layer of pink for tonal variation, and I went through lifting any stray globs of paint and moving them slightly, which gives the surface a look almost like a burn mark. For a final touch, I sprinkled a bit more salt into the foreground to break things up.

The Finished Painting

And that's the finished meadow landscape — new tools, an old brush rediscovered, a little frustration turned into something I'm happy with.