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.

Pathway of Dreams

This watercolour painting was made for a challenge in one of my Facebook groups. 
The January challenge in that group was "Mountains" and for a long time I thought I could not enter, because there are no mountains in my country and I do not visit mountainous landscapes during my vacations. This means that mountains are something I will have to study first, before being able to make a good painting, worthy of entering in a challenge.

But then I thought of the many 'views of Mt. Fuji' (by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai)  and decided to do something inspired by that theme, executed in my own way.
I made up a nice composition, with some trees and bushes, a road or path, a gate, some stone markers and of course the mountain.
This I painted in my own style, using a colour scheme that suggests the end of autumn or the beginning of winter.

The title of this painting refers to the gate which is a marker between the normal world and the spirit world and to the mountain itself because that is a holy mountain and an object of pilgrimage. 
Dreams or wishes are connected with the spirit world and I think that those who undertake a pilgrimage also have a dream or wish they want to be fulfilled.

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

It's time for winter paintings!

Winter will be here soon and with that comes the question about the Christmas Cards of this year. So I start to search the paintings I made last year for a candidate, sometimes with success, this time not. I have painted some nice foggy winter landscapes, but those are not suitable for Christmas Cards.
That meant that I had to paint a suitable winter scene from fantasy. For inspiration I asked my daughter for some guidelines and after her reply I had to start searching for images of gatehouses. Of course I found nothing I could use directly, many gatehouses are not what I was looking for. 

After some thinking this is what appeared in my sketch-book: some small buildings with a gate and a wall, a lane towards the gate and the suggestion of the continuing of that lane behind the wall, snow and lights in one of the buildings and a very small lantern by the gate.
For the colours I started with sepia but gradually I added more for the lights, the roofs and doors. And the shadows on the snow of course. And I added a small shrub of holly close to the building on the right. Look well, it really is there!

At first I was not satisfied with this painting, thinking the outlines of the buildings should be more defined. But looking at it a few days later the scene good as it is. In winter the world can be very grey and everything looks a bit dim on those days. The colour I used for the sky suggest one of those grey days so it is not necessary to alter the outlines of the  buildings.
So I decided to listen to my painting and not change a thing. 

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

The Gate.... now in a daylight version

The gate also deserved a daylight version, so here it is. I changed the shapes and the size of the gate a bit just for the fun of it.
I used a balanced palette of three colours here, a combination I used before and I like very much.
With these three basic colours I can mix almost all the colours needed in a landscape. 
To keep my painting clean and transparent I just have to avoid mixing all three together. 

This gate - and the versions I made earlier - is based on a gate we saw a few years ago in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. The 'real' gate was at a piece of land with only weeds and small stones in it. 
No buildings or ruins, no signs of a garden or the remains of it, no burial grounds, no factory, just a mystery! 
That is exactly why it appealed to my imagination and I am not really sure if this is the last Gate I will paint - I don't think so.

More information about this watercolour (size, colours used, etc) and the other Gates I painted can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr 

The Gate - in charcoal

I really did not expect to draw the gate again so soon, but here it is in charcoal.

As you can see, I made some changes to the drawing. 
The dimensions of the paper I use are a bit different, so the composition is a bit different. There are some differences between working with watercolour and working with charcoal and I used those differences to make some changes to the gate and to create a foggy atmosphere by blurring the trees.
I started working on another quality of paper and I am getting used to that too. It is easier to blur the trees now, but I have to take care not to saturate this paper too soon. Well, fine-tuning is a nice thing when it's about my hobby.

Now I made two versions of the Gate I can let it rest - for a few days or weeks. 
To me there is something very intriguing about this subject so there are definitely more gates to come. 

More information about this charcoal drawing (size, paper used, etc) and about the watercolour painting I made earlier can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr 

The gate to....

There really is a story behind this one!

First of all, we did see an abandoned gate like this during a walk through Vila Nova de Gaia, in Portugal. At that moment I asked my husband to take a picture for me, if only to remember the scene but I never used that picture as a reference. 
The memory of that gate remained and the plan to use the scene for a painting also kept lingering on the background of my to-do list.

A few days ago my daughter was talking to me and used the word 'gates' to explain something and all of a sudden I saw the picture I wanted to paint! Of course I made my apologies for not listening very well and got my sketchbook out and started composing my painting. 

When I started doing that, I planned a charcoal drawing but as I continued sketching it 'became' a watercolour and while thinking over which colour scheme would be the best for this painting I decided on the Twilight colours.
I am still not as comfortable with that set of colours as I am with the others on my palette so this was also a nice exercise for me.

That scene keeps calling out to me, so I expect to paint more gates - with different colour schemes, maybe also a charcoal drawing and certainly with some variations compared to the first sketch I made.

More information about this watercolour (size, colours used, etc.) can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr