Twisted Pine - Day 1

After I finished working on the Rose piece, I decided I needed to play around and be a little more expansive and experiment with new techniques. So I broke out some cheap Canson watercolor board (which I had never used before -- after I bought them, I read somewhere that they tend to buckle...and I now have first hand experience of this!), dug out our bottle of rubbing alcohol from the cabinet beneath the sink, and got to work. First I blocked out some basic shapes to get the value pattern down:

Then I took a large-ish brush and made a wash out of it with rubbing alcohol:

Then, after that dried (and after I tried in vain to eliminate the slight buckling of the paper), I started to lay down some pastel on top of the underpainting. Now it looks a bit more like the woods, and less like deep red blobs:

I spent about an hour and fifteen minutes on this in total today, not including research and setup. I'm looking forward to playing around with this piece some more!