Tree! - a Conté drawing

 

During the workshop morning with Pictura in the garden of the 'Dordrechts Museum' I sketched some of the trees there as these are old and impressive. 

There are three Platanus trees in that garden, that were already there when the Museum was founded, in the year 1904. These trees are maybe 200 years old and they look like their age. The trees are really large and as they are in a garden in an old city it is not possible to make a (reference) picture of the whole tree, they are too tall for that. 

The tree trunks have several bulges, maybe scar tissue where branches have been cut off. The lowest branch grows at least 3 meters above ground.

After I had made my sketch, I moved on to another tree and did not do much with this sketch. The sketch went to the exposition in the 'Pictura' building that ended over a week ago.

Now the sketch is back in my home - and my studio - I can work from it. The vertical lines in the sketch are showing the structure of the corrugated cardboard that we had to support our sheets of sketching paper.

It has been over two month that I was in that Museum garden and my memory of that tree has faded a little, there are no reference pictures, so the sketch is all I have to work with. 

This Conté drawing, using brown and earth colours on a light brown (naturel) background may not be an exact reproduction of the tree or the sketch, it does show what did attract my attention to this tree: the bulges on the tree trunk.

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

Wet tree - graphite drawing

 

The reference of the wet tree I photographed and sketched in the garden of the  Dordrechts Museum is once again my inspiration. This time I used tinted paper and my water soluble graphite to make this drawing.

In fact I am still looking for the best way to paint or draw the scene, using the sketch as my reference. Both the ink painting and the watercolour painting were not exactly what I hoped for - even though I made works I am happy with - so I tried tinted paper in a darker shade of brown than the background painting for my watercolour painting. 

This paper is not suitable for very wet techniques, so I used the water soluble graphite. One layer of graphite is worked on with as little water as possible to make the colours flow and 'wake them up' and after that I only used the dry graphite in several layers of colour to get this result. It starts looking more and more like a real wet tree, Once again I started with the lines of the sketch and made a drawing that looked well balanced.

I think I should let the reference sketch rest for now and look at the reference picture for another work, most likely a watercolour painting. The sketch has too little information (it started raining again, so we went inside) for further use.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this drawing and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog. If you are interested in my original artwork, please contact me.

Wet tree

 

In my previous post I wrote about the drawing workshop session I attended in the garden of the Dordrechts Museum where I got inspired by the water patterns on a tree trunk.

During that workshop session I made a reference picture, a sketch and an ink painting.

This time I used my sketch as a reference for a watercolour painting and maybe I will also be working from the picture. In the post about the ink painting I wrote about the weather, that there was limited time to complete my sketch, but that the composition in the sketch was interesting (lots of empty paper). The ink painting did not have these bits of empty paper - which does not make it a bad painting but it did not turn out as planned.

So today another try, using the sketch as my reference. Using watercolour and small brushes the fine lines of the water running down the tree trunk are easy to paint. 

The more horizontal lines - also wet with water and showing a lot of the structure of the tree bark - are again a challenge. When to stop? The reference sketch is good, but much more grey on white, this watercolour is much darker, giving much more contrast in the values of the painting. So I ended up adding more lines and some extra colour in the tree trunk to make the painting more balanced.

Again I had difficulties making a 'good' painting from a good (balanced) sketch and this will not be the last time this happens to me. Over the past years this happened more than once and I expect I will also have these 'problems' in the future. Well, this kind of trial and error are the best learning moments so they are good for me - a bit frustrating but good.

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

Wild Black Cherry (Prunus serotina)

 

A few months ago we (my husband and me) were walking a signposted walk in the 'Kalmthoutse Heide' when we came past some wild black cherry bushes. These plants were introduced in West-Europe about a century ago and proved to be invasive so now the foresters an nature managers are trying to control and eliminate the plant. That is not an easy task so years after we first learned about the invasive nature of the bush, we still could pass by some of them. 

There were still some berries on the bush so I made some reference pictures with the plan to paint these berries.

For this watercolour painting I selected a small size watercolour paper and worked with a very limited palette, trying my new paint colour in this painting both 'single' and in mixtures. For the background I let the paint flow on the wet paper, gravity was my trusted helper here. After the background had dried, I made the drawing of my berries and after these were painted I added the suggestion of the foliage, using the reference picture as a guide for the shapes. In the end I added some colour to the bottom part of the background to make the composition a bit more balanced.

The result is what I hoped it would be.

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.