Line of Junipers

Today I walked out to a part of my brother’s land that is usually a small pond ringed by a meadow and juniper trees. This year it is so dry that there is only a suggestion of green in the center where water would be normally. Dry or wet, this is one of my favorite places and I usually make a few sketches of it each year. Junipers have such an interesting shape and painting a whole line of them is a treat.

This painting is on a white quarter sheet of watercolor paper with a thin coat of gold watercolor ground. I expected to be able to lift color back to the gold ground to show the arid meadow. But something went wrong and the gouache adhered too strongly to lift, so instead I kept adding more and more marks with gouache and watercolor pencil.