PLANARIANES

Hadn't distressed paper with tea in some time, so I cut up my cheap watercolor paper again into tall strips. It has a nice texture to work with, and the wide landscape format carries its own special challenge. After applying the green tea and letting it sit for a bit, I got the idea to give it a reddish tint by really diluting the red ink I use and applying it as a thin layer, something that would give the impression of dried blood on parchment. It was also a nice change of pace to have a more earthly color palette instead of the normal stark whites and cool blues I tend to favor.
I love sumi-e ink and wash paintings as well as traditional Asian calligraphy, both ideas I wanted to visit for this piece.
This has also become a somewhat impromptu preview of a project I've had on the backburner for far too long. If you saw my "Magic Middle Finger" piece or my Elements Journal video, you saw part of it already. I worried about repeating myself, but these are thematically different enough that I didn't even want to give it a similar name.