Recently I have been re-reading an old book, A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle. It is actually one of the great favourites of mine for all these years.

I am not a reading person at all. I don’t have a moment of reading a book on the train or on the bed. I would rather using my eyes to see what’s passing by in the train window to get satisfaction in sense of colours and shapes.

I guess I have long passed that age where I could read a novel or fiction book. I did all my novel reading before 16 yo and left all the fantasies behind. After 25 years old, I suddenly found myself no longer interested in any sort of invented stories at all, and I only read for a particular purpose.

I read and borrow things all the time but I only buy books that I think it’s a classic or I could pick up for the second time reading. And I have a habit that if I LOVE a book, I could read it for more than 100 times (it’s not joking, it’s just obsessive).

However, for this time’s reading (I can’t remember how many time I had read this one), I re-looked at all the B&W illustrations in the book, and a couple of them were very interesting. I imitated one of them with sketch pencil first then micron pigma ink pen, and finally finished up with some watercolour wash last night.

This morning, I was shocked by the horrible colours that I had used last night for the washes. It was a really bad idea to do a watercolour at night time. There is a Chinese word “艳俗” which probably can best describes it. Nothing seems right, I don’t know what I was thinking. However, I really love the country atmosphere that was created by every little things in this scene. I just couldn’t imagine what kind of colour shades would have been present over there