During my painting vacation there always was time to do other things than painting. After dinner we often went for a short walk, sometimes in small groups, sometimes alone. This year the weather was great for those walks, not too hot and no rain so we could walk the fields and forest paths easily.
During these walks I made pictures of the forest and one of the pumpkin field we passed one evening. That picture was used as reference for a charcoal study and a watercolour painting.
I started with the charcoal and pencil study to find the right composition
and I already had decided I would make the pumpkins stand out by giving them their natural colours with watercolour pencils.
The drawing is - compared to the reference picture - 'wrong' in the meaning of how I used the black of the charcoal. In reality the leaves are the darkest greens, the stems of the plants are a lighter shade of green. In the drawing the stems are dark and black, the leaves are grey. But this works really well, so I decided to make my watercolour painting just like I had made the charcoal study.
For the composition I left out some of the pumpkins and the sheet of watercolour paper is filled completely with the image I wanted to paint. In fact the watercolour paper is just a bit smaller than the paper I used for the charcoal study so I did not have to make my drawing smaller or larger for the painting.
After I had decided on the colour I wanted to use for the background, the leaves and the stems of the pumpkin plants I could start painting.
The result is what I hoped it would be.
The information about the materials I have used for both works, their sizes and availabilities and - if you are interested in my original artworks - my contact information can all be found in my Tumblr blog.
