The first lesson in all the Muse Groups is spontaneously painting with inks and gesso. It's a way to start out playfully and we are instantly delighted when we see the colorful inks explode onto the wetted paper and mix with other colors as we tip the paper and scrape or roller on some gesso texture.  

Sometimes however, we get carried away and before long have a brownish greenish gray soup (and I don't mean split pea!) that has lost all of the color vibrancy we started out with.

In this lesson you may avoid some of this by starting out with clear contact paper and cutting out some abstract shapes.  Peel the backing off and find a pleasing pattern to stick them onto your watercolor paper, burnishing to get them stuck on as well as possible.

Now wet a big shape on your paper, or all over if you want.  Dropper on acrylic inks. Stick to two analogous colors (close on the color wheel) to begin with.  Do some tipping and dripping and blending.  Squirt on a bit of gesso, if you want, and run a scraper through it for some surface texture and blending with the inks. The area you have masked with the clear contact paper will remain white paper.

Dry your painting and rewet to go in for another transparent layer of ink.  In the above piece I droppered on black ink in the second layer, leaving plenty of unpainted surface as well.  Dry again.

Now peel off the contact paper shapes.  You can leave them white or paint them if you want.  You might try a focal point color to jazz up the color combo.  In this piece the blue complements the orange. And you can repeat those same shapes elsewhere in the piece to strength the design.

Layers of color dried in between may help to keep you out of the mud while still giving you some unexpectedly unique color vibrations. You're in for surprises of the sort that will keep you at the table playing and call you back again and again!