Earth and water is one of the definitions of mud. Ending up with “mud” is a common complaint of new watercolour painters who are trying to mix colours.
Painting mud on purpose is a different thing altogether.
One of the challenges I have been focusing on lately is how to paint water in the shallow streams of the Niagara Escarpment. They may appear golden, or a rich brown, depending on depth and amount of silt on the bottom.
The easiest way to get accurate colour is to use earth-based pigments, which are quite literally mud. The problem is that most are not transparent. They tend to look too dead and lifeless on the paper to represent a clear stream bed.
I spent about five hours doing colour tests on scraps of paper before I started this painting. First I tried various mixtures of pigments, then zeroed in on the order in which they were layered.
After all the colour tests, the actual painting went very quickly, and I decided to leave it a little under painted to preserve the loose feel of it.
Carol Hughes art 
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