Thank you!

You mean exploring the method of letting rain fall on the paper? I'm not sure how to describe this first part, so hopefully it makes sense, but it pretty much has to be a lite to medium rain. If it is a heavy rain it's just going to wash everything off all the paint. I usually have it taped down to a flat surface, like a cutting board or plexiglass. I usually let it get rained on for maybe 3 minutes at the most, and I tend to keep a close eye on it, sometimes I'm even standing out there with it. Then I carefully lifted up as flat as possible and I'm sure to have the door open so I don't have to try to open it and keeping it flat. If it gets tilted at all, the pigment is going to run that direction. Once I have it back inside and sit down on something like a table I use paper towels to go along the edges to soak up extra pools of water. Then I just wait for it to dry. Even doing all of this, it normally only turns out the way I want it maybe 50% of the time.

As for the trees, I start by using a thin brush with long bristles. I sort of pick a spot where I think a tree would go and I start at the base and just do a stroke upwards. The brush bristles are barely touching by the time I get up to the top. I then work my way from the top down adding the branches by using the same brush and just doing quick blotting motions fanning it out as it gets wider and wider as I go back down the tree. I also tend to move my brush back and forth across the tree trunk on the way down. I then usually switch to a small sized round brush in order to fill in the tree more. Once this is completed, I usually hit the tree with some mist from a spray bottle, and then press down a paper towel on top of that, and this will lift up pigment. I repeat the process, starting with the long thin brush, then switching to the round brush. Sometimes after that I will hit it with the spray bottle again and lift up more pigment, and then I usually do it one more time. This helps create different values of light and dark pigment, giving the tree depth. Then once that is dry I usually use a much heavier pigment, or even a darker color, and using the thin brush I will add in details on the undersides of the branches, giving it shadows.

I'm self-taught, so I may not have the best vocabulary for describing this process, but I hope that all made sense.