Every stone a story

For the last two lessons, the Chinese brush painting teacher had us working on looking at random ink splotches applied via crumpled paper and looking through them to see rocks, which we would then bring up out of the noise via judicious application of ink washes. I found this, er, difficult, and produced a lot of cubist rocks with nonsense geometry (but, alas, not in an interesting deliberate way).

This time, instead of starting with nearly random ink, she taught us techniques that were more like applying random distortions to the ink you meant to put down. It would still do what you wanted ... very approximately.

I loved it. It was like I'd been hiking with a heavy pack for the past two lessons, and now finally I'd gotten to the campsite and had taken it off and was walking unencumbered. Ink only wandering about the page semi-randomly felt almost too easy.
( glue and salt, sea and stone )