A red dirt landscape
A sketch. It's a tree with houses behind.
A palm painted with red dirt.
by Ekaterina Levina
A local Kauai company manufacturing T-shirts started using red dirt for dying T-shirts after a hurricane ruined a lot of merchandise in 1992.
It's very common to see red hills on Kauai when you drive around the island.
I decided to use the dirt for my sketches. It was pretty easy – I mixed the dirt with some water and used a watercolor brush to paint. The mixture reminded me gouache paint with its texture.
I thought that this how medieval artists managed to find painting material – they looked around and used common things, and some of them were dirt cheap like clays and charcoal.
If I painted on a wall somewhere I probably would feel like a cave artist, but I used watercolor paper, so I wouldn't go that far in my imagination.
A local Kauai company manufacturing T-shirts started using red dirt for dying T-shirts after a hurricane ruined a lot of merchandise in 1992.
It's very common to see red hills on Kauai when you drive around the island.
I decided to use the dirt for my sketches. It was pretty easy – I mixed the dirt with some water and used a watercolor brush to paint. The mixture reminded me gouache paint with its texture.
I thought that this how medieval artists managed to find painting material – they looked around and used common things, and some of them were dirt cheap like clays and charcoal.
If I painted on a wall somewhere I probably would feel like a cave artist, but I used watercolor paper, so I wouldn't go that far in my imagination.
