Kalmthoutse Heide - August

 

Now is the time of the year that the heather is in bloom so we went for a walk on the 'Kalmthoutse Heide', a protected Natural Reserve that is mostly in Belgium but crosses the border with The Netherlands in the Western parts of the Reserve. Because of the various lockdowns we had over the last year and a half, we had not visited the Kalmthoutse Heide for a long time.

We made the signposted walk that was our first in that area and we could see some differences - nature did not really suffer during the lockdowns. Of course I made several (reference) pictures of the heather in full bloom and some other nice views.

One of these pictures is used for this watercolour. The clouds were really dark, we had rain twice during the walk and because of the grey sky the trees also looked like dark shapes without much contrast. Of course I did not paint every little flower on every patch of heather, I prefer to paint an impression of the landscape and the viewer is welcome to imagine the details. 

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

They fell too early....

 

The chestnut tree in our garden had a lot of flowers this spring and there were many little chestnuts growing on the branches of the tree. Usually there are more little chestnuts than the tree can feed so over time some fall. That begins at the end of spring and it will end in a few weeks. The ones that are still in the tree by then will grow to be beautiful large chestnuts.  

What falls now is at least three to five centimetres in diameter and when they open, a very little chestnut is already inside.

For this watercolour painting I have dripped some paint on a stretched watercolour paper, like I did during my painting vacation,. This time the paint I used was not very concentrated so it would dry faster (I work indoors now) and it could also be painted over without disturbing the background layer. 

On my background I have made a composition of chestnuts still inside their husks and some of the empty husks, that have opened after drying. Some are exactly the right size, but most of the chestnuts are painted larger than life. The fallen chestnut shells dry quickly and turn (dark) brown so I used the real colours of my subjects to paint them. Adding shadows to these dark brown colours was not easy, but I managed to suggest their round shapes and add some depth to the composition.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Diergaarde Blijdorp, Rivièrahal

 

New months keep coming and it's time for the August challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' which is about Monuments.

Of course I can go looking for castles and that kind of buildings, but I have some favourite monuments that are not the obvious choice.

In Diergaarde Blijdorp (Blijdorp Zoo, Rotterdam) are 21 listed monuments and the Rivièrahal is one of them. During a visit to the Zoo my husband made some nice reference pictures for me and I decided to paint this scene, the back entrance with on the right the entrance to the indoor accommodations of the black rhinoceroses.

To keep the monumental atmosphere I painted a monochromatic Sepia watercolour. The round shapes of the buildings are still a challenge in itself, but I am happy with the overall result.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Branch patterns

 

This is the last work I made during our painting week, still using an abstract background and painting on top of that. Our teacher Ad van Aart asked me to paint only branches on a background, in a way that the trees would not be in the painting - going as abstract as possible for me after this week.

This time I chose a blue background, simply because the other colour choices did not seem 'right'. The branches had to have a contrasting colour and yellow or orange do limit the choices in contrasting colours very much - only a very dark blue or brown are options on such a background. Using a blue background I could still chose brown, but also a dark red or violet and even a dark green.

For this painting I decided to use another earth colour with a violet shade that could be light when using a lot of water or very dark and opaque with just a little water to paint easier.

Because the trees were to be out of sight I painted large branches coming in from all directions and added smaller branches - using a smaller brush - to the composition of the large ones. While at work I decided to use one of the lighter spots of the background to show a glimpse of that background - or sky - and make the branch pattern a little less dense around it.

While painting I have used other line patterns for my branches than I used in the 'Trees in the foreground' paintings (which have sharp angles), the branches in this painting have rounded curves and angles.  Filling the whole paper like this was a lot of work, in the end it became almost meditative and I enjoyed working like this very much.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Wild teasel

 

During our painting vacation, our teacher Ad van Aart took us to a natural side stream of the river Waal for inspiration. The views of the river, the riverbanks and the side stream were great and I made several pictures and some drawings for future reference, but I also saw a large Teasel plant and I made a reference picture to use with one of the abstract backgrounds I was working with during the week. 

For this mixed media work I made a relatively dark red background in which the earth pigments are dominant. This was done as a wash and the background dried quickly, so I could use it the same afternoon.

Using my watercolour pencils I made a drawing of the teasel plant, using the reference picture as my guidance. I could not fit the whole plant on the paper so I used the shapes of the stems, the flowers and the leaves to make a good composition. The large leaves and the flowers have several layers of colour, the stems and the smaller leaves have only one or two layers. 

The plant was already withering and some leaves had a dry straw-like colour on the edges. The small flowers were already gone, only the large flower heads remained. I have always loved this plant and wanted to paint or draw it, so I took my chance and enjoyed making this mixed media work.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this work and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog. 

Trees in the foreground - 2

 

After the first abstract background with trees in the foreground I wanted to make a second abstract background with something in the foreground. So I selected another set of colours, preparing and pouring them in the same way as I did with my first painting in this technique.

Again it took several hours to dry and in this case I had to wait until the next morning before I could continue with the foreground. I had not decided yet, after a short conversation with our teacher Ad van Aart it was decided that I would paint trees again, but with a different contrasting colour and different shapes. The amount of trees has changed as well.

With this painting I have also suggested some depth in the tree line. The trees that are really in front of everything have at least three layers of paint, so the background colours are almost covered. The chosen contrasting colour for the trees is a little opaque and I have used this quality as good as possible. 

The result is different from the first painting, but that was intended and I am happy with both experiments. I have learned a lot from these paintings and I will surely use the lessons learned in the future.

The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this work can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Trees in the foreground - 1

 

During my painting vacation I wanted to improve my skills and confidence in working on an abstract background. Our teacher Ad van Aart  showed me some abstract art made by various artists for inspiration and guidance.

For this background I mixed watercolour paint from the tube with a very small amount of water and poured that on my stretched (and dried) paper. I moved the paper a little bit, but the white in between the coloured spots had to stay. After my first layer had dried, I added another colour and let that dry completely. 

This takes time and patience. 

We had a nice day and I used the warmth of the sun to dry my paper, but it took several hours. I decided to continue after some hours and have a very relaxed morning.

Before starting to paint, I gave the edges of the paper a little bit of the last colour I poured on using my usual watercolour technique. This dried quickly.

Inspired by a line of trees close by I painted the trees in the foreground with a contrasting colour. There is some depth in the tree line but these trees are to be as abstract as I could get them without losing the characteristics of the trees.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this work and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

After the fire

 

During my painting vacation there was time for workshops, but also time to work as we wished to do. After I had used a picture of a skull last year to create a mixed media work, our teacher Ad van Aart brought some real animal skulls and bones with him this year for inspiration.

Drawing a skull from life is a bit different than using a picture, but I thought it clarifying . With a real skull in front of me, I can change my viewpoint to understand its structure which of course is not possible when using a picture.

The skull that inspired me is an animal skull found in Iceland and it belonged to a goat or sheep (that was not clear any more). I made a drawing using my watercolour pencils on a large sheet of paper and after this was finished I added trees with charcoal.  I decided to draw a burned forest, that seems to be the current state of a lot of forest areas.

These last weeks (months) there have been many forest areas on fire, mostly in the Southern parts of Europe, but also in North America and there is a huge fire going on in Siberia. These fires are alarming. I am not directly endangered by the fires or the smoke but the impact on the world climate is huge as we need the forests to cool down the  climate and slow down or even stop global warming, so I do feel uneasy about what's happening.

Now the mixed media work is finished, it seems to have become not only a drawing of a skull and a burned forest area. 

Something mythical has added itself to the atmosphere while I was working. 

These surprises are always welcome.

The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this mixed media drawing can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Castle Ruins

 

Last week I planned to work on watercolour underpaintings or painted backgrounds. This work is a Conté drawing on an underpainting, using a light, neutral colour to make the drawing stand out more.

During the painting week, our teacher and coach Ad van Aart took us to the castle ruins of Batenburg for inspiration. We only took our drawing or sketching materials with us, because we would not be there for more than two hours. 

The town of Batenburg is very small these days and the castle ruins are closed for the public but we had a good view from the other side of the moat and I made some sketches and reference pictures. 

One of the sketches was used for this drawing. On a light, neutral watercolour underpainting I used Conté Sketching Crayon applied in several layers to draw the round shapes of the ruins and the tangle of ivy plants hanging down from the broken walls. There are other plants growing, even a small bush growing from one of the buildings and I tried to draw them all, which is not really easy with a Conté Crayon.

The shapes of the ruins helped to create a composition beginning at the bottom on the left side and ending halfway on the right side of the paper (or the other way down of course) and the hanging ivy plants are the vertical composition lines.

The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this work can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Cows

 

Last week I had my painting vacation, which means that I was part of a diverse group of amateur artists that worked hard under the guidance of Ad van Aart, our teacher and coach, to improve our painting and art-making skills.

This year I planned to improve my skills in working on an abstract background. Maybe I just needed to improve my self-confidence but the result is the same. I worked hard for a week and I learned a lot.

The first day always starts with 'blind contour drawing' and one of the things I chose as a subject was a large group of cows in the meadow close by our location.

The group almost looked like one compact mass with lots and lots of legs and my contour drawing showed that image.

On an orange background made with several colours I painted that mass of cows using a contrasting colour. At this point I had a talk with our teacher and it was decided that I would add more structure to the group of cows, indicating the shapes of their backs and darkening some of the legs to suggest depth in the group.

After that was done, the shadows under the cows were painted using one of the colours of the background and the space above the cows was given more structure using the same colour. The shape above the cows is not so well defined so it could be a tree line or the shapes of clouds, that is 'in the eye of the beholder'.

Because this was relatively new to me - I have worked on a background like this before but I have never before painted cows - it took a long time and a lot of thinking before this was completed, but I am happy with the results I got this first painting day of my vacation.

The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this painting can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Maasvlakte - sunset 3

 

During our walk by the shoreline at the Maasvlakte a few weeks ago I made a lot of reference pictures of the setting sun and I have already painted some watercolours. I did not make all the pictures standing up a bit from the waterline, I also made some pictures with a lower viewpoint, as low as I could get in a comfortable way (I wanted to stay dry and I had to get up without too much help) and for this watercolour I used one of those pictures.

There are some sandbanks a bit further away and these are only distinguishable from this point of view because there are no ripples. These sandbanks are not covered with water but very wet (almost quicksand) and they reflect the sunlight even better than the seawater around them.

The sun is almost touching the horizon and where the water is shallow the reflection of the sunlight is beautiful. The dark shapes are the waves rolling in, in backlight. I was crouching on a sandbank so there was water all around me - I did not want the beach to be visible in the reference picture.  After making a few pictures we had to leave, the sand was still too wet to hold us for a long time.

The painting is inspired by the reference picture and my memories of that walk so it is not an exact copy of reality (that's why it is a painting). 

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

The gate between....

 

Yesterday we were in the Archeon, a museum site where houses from different ages in the past are rebuilt and filled with the materials the people used in these days. One of the big attractions of that museum is, that there are volunteers and professional historians dressed like the people of the era in question and giving lots of information about daily life in that time. Every year we meet other people, telling new tales about life in the past so revisiting is a great experience.

There is a place in the park where you can sit down in a modern playground - having lunch or waiting for playing children - and look through a gate into the scenes of the Iron Age.

While sketching the gate, I had a 'What if' moment and decided to paint that gate as if it really was a gate between the ages.

Everything behind the gate is misty and unknown, even the sky is grey, while the sky that can be seen above the gate is blue and the trees and bushes beside it are painted in shades of green. Because I wanted to suggest a distant, misty scene with bushes on the other side of the gate it may look like the fence on the left is continued in that landscape. These coincidences are only too common in a flat landscape like ours and only the grey and blurred shades that are behind the gate show the differences between the landscape that is behind the gate and the landscape that is on this side.

In the end I think that these 'happy accidents' add to the mystery of the gate. 

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.