In an effort to get more variation in colour, I thought to start with watercolour pencil - which allows for fine-grained control of the variation in colour - along with acrylic on top to tie the colour in to one shade. I think.
Anyway, here is the watercolour starting point:
No particular plan in how to put the colours in place, just whimsy.
As always, varnish then acryic (or the other way around?) but anyway layers. As expected, this smooths out the variation somewhat but leaves some in place. Not sure it totally works …
As always, the picture doesn’t do it justice, but also there are some obvious problems such as the clumping up of the acrylic on the edges.