Colours of Nature.

I nipped to my storage unit yesterday afternoon, as I needed a cup. A real cup and saucer. A tale for another time.

In my search I found these. Old sketch books I was rarely without when I was smaller than I am today.

I have never been a painter. Ever. I have only been drawn to colour, light and nature - not necessarily in that order. I flipped through the pages of my little painting books and over time, the colours I seemed to use changed - from the hot brights to a more, um, subtle palette.

I have my theories on that. But it's interesting as a very good friend has a beautiful water-colour painting in his house. It sparks my brain every time I pause and look into it, and something he said about the softening textures, the layering of a watercolour painting, has been whirring in my mind since.

One of the qualities I love about watercolours, is that they layer so beautifully, especially if you have the patience to let the underlayer dry. And when you look at something that has been brilliantly painted in that way, you seem to get this slight shift of colours that happnes when you move through space in the real world, or as the light changes throughout the day.

There's a wonderful painter and creator who lives on Dartmoor, who uses actual earth pigments - clays and rusts and powdered stones from all over the world for making his wood sculptures. I can easily imagine him working by candlelight in a small mountain village in feudal Japan. Not sure he'd be partial to that imagining of him - I reckon that would last about half an hour!

Since I am a big one for 'what if?' & 'let's see what happens when we do this thing that just popped into my mind...' the days of my life seem to resonate with a watercolour painter, adding a bit of pigment to the paste, and then a little bit more and then another colour and then a bit more of medium to make it easier to work with, and then roll it out to see if I like the colour, (which I usually don't!) and so I add a bit more pigment and test it, and then it's only by very happy accident that this part of my life has gotten to the colour I like. To be clear though, I often get a colour I like very much that day.

It's so important to keep happily playing in the background, making new colours, rolling them out, cutting them into shapes as we think of other things that we are constructing in our lives, like little books about pirate queens and edges of worlds balanced on the backs of elephants and sea turtles.

I've been off radar from the world for a week - and even within the adventures we were having, there was talk of flowers, and trees and weeds that make natural dyes and colour our world. And now, I'm imagining myself pottering about a small housie in the woods, cackling to myself whilst I brew the dyes of life in a giant cauldron....that'll last about an hour and the kitchen will be a mess and it will smell vaguely of rotting swamp things and then... well, you never know what'll come of it.

Have a most brilliant week ahead, dear all.