Grassy Meadow with Poppies

This is another example from Adelene Fletcher's "Painting Landscapes: A Pocket Reference." It practices on masking fluid and wet-in-wet technique.

Applying masking fluid is easy, but it's almost impossible not to destroy the brush. I use a dirt cheap synthetic brush for the job and only for the job. One of my books mentions that by applying a thin layer of soapy water, brushes won't be destroy by the masking fluid. I don't know if it works, but I like my solution better.

The Moleskine Watercolor Notebook does not take wet-in-wet well. I should've known that, since the spec clearly shows that its paper is 200gsm (about 90lb) only, a lightweight WC paper. I tried to paint this one twice on the Moleskine WC paper and both turned out to be awful. I finally gave up and used this 140lb (300gsm) WC paper, and it indeed behaved as expected. (The wet-in-wet is not as pretty as the one in the book due to the user error.) I think the Moleskine should work out pretty well with WC sketching, which is my intent anyway. Serious painting should use serious paper, not this lightweight stuff.

Media: colored pencil, watercolor.