Hawthorn berries

After I have been painting flowers last week and one more after returning home I was looking for inspiration again while we were walking in a park. There were not many flowers left and the berries on the bushes were attracting my attention. That is why I made some reference pictures of the fruits of the hawthorn bushes we were passing.
I like the hawthorn bushes, in springtime they have wonderful flowers, the whole bush seems to turn white and their fruits are early as well, now is the end of summer in our country (Netherlands) and the bushes and trees of the hawthorn are already showing more red fruits than green leaves in some places.

Using my reference pictures I have been making a composition of the shapes of some of the leaves and some groups of berries. For my colour scheme I decided on a mixture of reds and browns to make it look like an autumn painting.

The background was painted first in a few layers and I already took care to leave a light spot where the group of berries would be painted.
The composition was drawn on my background - I really do draw this again, so mistakes and corrections are possible and I can adapt my composition to the size of my paper when that is necessary.
Using the colours of my background and one extra shade of red I painted all the leaves, berries, bits of branches and of course I added shadows and saved the highlights.

These last few weeks I am exploring the colour combinations I can make with the paints that are in my collection. I like to paint using harmonious colour schemes and though these kind of paintings often need a contrasting colour for depth, shadows or defining shapes I am happy that most of the paintings I have made these last weeks are what I hoped them to be or sometimes even better.

The details about paper, paints and size of this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

In my garden - my cucumber plant

Back home again after a week of painting and learning means driving home in the first place, washing clothes, putting all painting stuff in their places in the little studio and posting my artwork on my website, blog and Instagram.
In short,  there is a bit of a distance between the vacation and where I am now, not only because of the three hours drive home. I have returned to normal life again.

I still want to continue painting like I have done last week under the guidance of Ad van Aart and there is a deadline for a challenge. 
The August challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' (the amateur art association of which I am a member) is all about coming home after a vacation or any other trip.

So what do I come home to? 
Lots of things, but in this case I found a very patient model in the cucumber plant in my garden. I have sketched flowers, leaves and one cucumber and made a composition out of these shapes that would fit on the sheet of paper I have chosen for this painting.
There were some more shades of yellow to experiment with and I have chosen to paint the leaves in the green shades that appear when a grayish blue is mixed with one of my yellow colours. 
The yellow background did interfere with the mixtures of green, as was to be expected. That is one of the nice challenges of watercolour, the background colour will always be part of the result. 

I have tried to return to that 'state of mind' I was in during that wonderful week in Milonga and I think I could do that quite well. Now I have to make my decisions (about composition, these are the ones that still make me feel insecure) all on my own, without any help from a teacher, but I just want to be able to do this, so I have to practise!

Last Saturday I left France with a lot of ideas so I will continue painting in the weeks to come and I hope I will lose my insecurities about composition while painting.

The details about the materials I used and other information can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Hedge bindweed, shades of orange

This is the last painting I made while I was in Milonga, taking lessons from Ad van Aart.
For my yellow painting I prepared a composition with the shapes of leaves, flowers and buds of the hedge bindweed and selected a section for that painting.
During a few moments spare time I coloured the leaves outside that section of my sketch and that inspired my teacher to suggest that I should paint the whole sketch in this fashion.

So I made a drawing of the whole sketch on my watercolour paper and taped the inner section before making an orange background. I used three layers of paint to achieve a nice background. Then I started painting the shapes of the leaves, buds and flowers that were in the orange section of my paper, using dark brown colours that were also in the background.
After this was dry, I removed the tape and started to draw the lines of the shapes inside the 'white' section with Graphitint pencils. When water is applied to those lines they change colours and the pencil lines can flow out a little. I have used that for the leaves and buds inside the white section. For the flowers I added another colour of Graphitint pencil and I have applied water here as well.
The lines that give the flowers their shape were put in last, on completely dry paper.

While working on this one, I closely looked at my composition, some lines and marks that were not planned initially were added to make the painting as perfect as possible.

This one was hard work, mostly on the composition part but again I have learned a lot and I will be doing more like this at home, in my own studio.
There are more variations on this theme to be explored and I am really looking forward to all the possibilities that lie in front of me.

More information about this painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Hydrangea - shades of red

These Hydrangea flowers are also in the garden of Milonga, where I was last week for a painting vacation. These flowers intrigue me very much, mostly because the large four leaf shapes on the outside are not flowers at all. They are there to seduce the insects to come to the plant and the five pointed shapes in the middle are the real flowers, waiting to be fertilised by those insects. 

I have sketched some of the 'fake flowers' ans some of the shapes in the heart of the structure, the flower buds and some of the star shaped 'real flowers' to make a nice composition for a red painting.
This time I made the background in shades of red and I had to use three layers of watercolour paint before it was to my liking. In the middle was to be a source of light, this is different from the paintings I made earlier this week, where the light came from one of the corners.

Our teacher Ad van Aart helped me find the right composition for this background and advised during the making of the painting. I had to add some more flower shapes on the edges of my painting and added a light wash of yellow to make the light source warm.

Even if this is only one week, I am learning fast and I really am happy with the result of this experiment. I never thought I would be painting flowers every day and enjoying it but this is what happened to me during this painting vacation. 
There is one more painting to come that I made in Milonga, but at home I will have to explore this theme a bit more, there are a lot of nice colour combinations and compositions that have not been tried yet.

More information about this watercolour painting (size, colours and paper used, availability, contact information, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Hedge bindweed, painted in shades of yellow

After I had painted in red and orange, I wanted to paint in shades of yellow. The hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium) flowers grow in the garden of Milonga, so it was easy to sketch a few and make a composition using the shapes of the flowers, leaves and buds.
Our teacher Ad van Aart suggested that I should try to make my background first and add the flower composition later. For the background I painted three layers of shades of yellow, taking care to leave one corner almost white and to make another corner as dark as possible with yellow as my chosen colour.

From the prepared composition the best cut out (for the background that was created) was selected - with a little help from our teacher - and drawed on the dry watercolour paper using a watercolour pencil.
Using watercolour paint in an ochre colour I accentuated the leaves and the buds, the flowers were given an extra 'shadow' with my darkest shade of yellow. Finally the flowers were given their true shape by adding fine lines of a dark earthly red colour.

This technique - painting my background first and then adding some flower shapes - is different from the Umbels paintings I made before and I like the result even more. 
In fact I have made some more paintings 'like this' during my stay in Milonga and I have plans to make more of them now that I am back home.

More information about this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Umbels, painted in shades of red and orange

During my painting vacation in Milonga I wanted to paint flowers and I wanted to use the colours red, orange and yellow. 
The first morning our teacher Ad van Aart asked all of us what we wanted to do during that week and I indicated my wishes. So most of the time I have been sketching, drawing and painting flowers.
My first paintings are based on a 'blind contour' sketch of some umbels that were in the garden of Milonga. I have made a background using shades of red, added the flowers and strengthened the background with the shades I had already used and added a Gray for the shadows and stems of the flowers. This red painting followed the composition of the initial sketch.

After this first painting I was eager to do a second one with shades of orange. This painting is on a much larger sheet of paper and I deliberately changed the composition (advised by Ad, our teacher) so there is much more open space above the flowers. The shadows are made with sepia which is much more harmonious with the orange shades of the background.

Using a much larger sheet of paper was a bit more challenging, but I still had lots of fun painting this one.

Both paintings are what I thought they would be and I am happy that I did choose to paint this subject, using a very limited palette. I have explored the shades of red and orange and I have experimented with the composition these flowers offered me.

Of course this was not the end of my week in Milonga, so there is more to follow!

More information about these watercolour paintings (size, colours used, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Landscape with elements of surprise

Last week in Milonga I painted the landscape only once, in a workshop about surprises in our paintings.
Our teacher Ad van Aart had prepared this lesson and I was eager to join (these lessons are voluntary, we are not required to attend).

The aim was to paint a scene and to add an element of surprise to the painting. 
My plan was to paint a landscape (this is the view from my bedroom that week) and add checkerboard - like marks on top of it for my first 'surprise' and do something with a flower shape for the second 'surprise'. It was easy to paint the landscape so I have made three versions that are almost identical and gave two of them a 'paint over'.

This was fun and I liked doing this. 
The flower shape was the hardest, mostly because I had tried to hide the underlying landscape completely and that could not be done with watercolour paint. 
So I washed away some of the paint but the result is not really beautiful. 
That is a lesson learned.

More information about these watercolour paintings can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Leaves

Last week I was in Milonga again, a week full with painting, drawing and learning organised by Ad van Aart.
I have learned a lot this week and now I am trying to write coherent blog posts about the paintings and drawings I came home with.

This charcoal drawing is the result of an instruction about composition. We were to fill the sheet with our subject, make a cut out and find a good composition.

I had sketched some leaves and decided on this the best cut out. 
Charcoal is my preferred medium for this drawing and I really am happy with the result.

A few days later, the last day of the week I had some spare time and I decided to try a mixed media experiment.
I made a watercolour background in shades of blue and wanted to make a drawing on top of that. The sketch with the leaves deserved some more attention and this time I made a drawing with all three leaves in it, using watercolour pencils in some shades of green.
The structure of the watercolour paper is still visible and I really like that.

More information about these two drawings can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Mushroom - if I only knew which one this is....

We are having a nice summer here, not as hot as last year and some days, even weeks with rain to keep our nature hydrated.
Last weekend we went for some signposted walks near the Visitors Centre in Oisterwijk (Netherlands) and made some nice pictures while we were walking. Those will be used as reference pictures later.

Near the entrance of the Visitors Centre were some logs of dead wood, nor even the bark was left on it, so I have no idea what trees these used to be. Growing from one of these logs there was  a nice group of mushrooms, white, light yellow and a bit of orange. (I have not been able to find the name of the mushrooms) I did make some reference pictures and decided to paint these in my 'white on black' technique, with the use of some watercolour pencils for the details that don't want to be painted.

Of course that needs to be explained: the black paper I am using is not watercolour paper, it absorbs a lot of water and paint before the white stands out. This really takes five or more layers. The log of dead wood that provides the food for the mushroom is very dark and does not need so many layers of paint, but the few details of the log I did want to show would 'sink into the paper' if I used my paint for them. So here is where my pencils come into the process and the details are there where I want them to be.

I really like the results I get with this technique. At first, I only mixed gouache and watercolour, but the pencils really add that something I missed in some of my first 'white on black' paintings.

More information about this painting (materials and colours used, size, contact information, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Medieval sheds - another summer storm scene

In my previous post I have painted a reconstruction of a Medieval barn that has been found somewhere in our country. More buildings have been rebuilt and are to be visited for the public and I have been sketching these sheds too. These are dated a few centuries earlier than the barn I have already painted,they are from the Early Middle Ages and the remains of these buildings have also been found in our country.

Again I have painted a cloudy sky, like an approaching storm and I have added some trees to the scene. The reconstruction sites also have trees, but these are not always near the buildings I have sketched. These reconstructed buildings have to be visited by a lot more people than originally lived there in the Middle Ages. 

So for my paintings I 'replace' the trees a bit.

The shed in the back is completely constructed from wood, which has obtained a nice grayish shade over time. The shed in front has a thatched roofing with a lot of mosses growing on top of that. 

The entrances of the sheds were not to be seen from the spot where I found a place to sit and sketch, but that did not really matter to me. I did like the view from that point so I sketched what I could see and painted this scene with the sketch as my reference.

I wanted to give this scene a rural (Medieval) atmosphere and I really like the result.

More information about this painting (materials,size,availability, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com