Primo Vere (early springtime)

 

One of my usual New Year's resolutions is to participate in painting challenges and I do try each year, but most of the times the challenges do not inspire me at all, so I do not participate more than I already did. 

This time I am inspired by a challenge in one of the Facebook groups I am in. The theme is 'Spring' and I have to participate with a work of art, not necessarily a watercolour.

Of course I could make a nice painting of flowers, birds, green foliage or something like that, but I want to do something different (no surprise here).

Springtime is also bird's nests and eggs hatching in those nests, so I chose to use that theme.

Using a book for colour and size reference I have chosen some of the birds that visit my garden, a blue tit, a robin, a blackbird, a dunnock and a jackdaw. The hatching egg is a chicken egg. 

I have tried to draw nests as the birds probably would make (again using the descriptions in the book) and I have taken care to draw the eggs in the right scale, taking the chicken's egg as my standard. 

The scientific names (in Latin) are written under the nests and I have used a dictionary to find the Latin words for 'early springtime'.

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

Time for mushrooms again!

Now autumn is really here, after a few days with a lot of rain there are also mushrooms everywhere. That gave me the idea to look into my reference pictures again, looking for a nice mushroom to paint or draw. These reference pictures are mostly made by my husband (he holds the camera most of the times we are walking) and I keep them until I get inspired to use one or more of these pictures.

This time I chose a 'false chanterelle' for my model-of-the-day. As usual I had to look in a book about mushrooms to know the name of this one.

On a sheet of paper I made a watercolour under painting, using the earth colours in my palette. For this under painting I have chosen to use study quality paints, one of the reasons for that is they are gathering dust now and that is a waste of good paint. These may not be the best paints but nevertheless they are good quality and can be used for an under painting like this.
The under painting has only one layer of paint, so the pencil work can stand out against it.

For the mushrooms and the grasses I have used Graphitint pencils (by Derwent) and only the mushrooms have had a touch of water, changing the colours a bit and filling up the little wells in the paper. The grasses are a bit ragged now, and that is exactly what I wanted them to be this late in the year. Two of the mushrooms had some lines drawn with a Line Marker, but these do not really stand out much. The difference is visible, but very subtle.

Working on this drawing was fun and I am happy with the result.

The details about the paper and all the colours of watercolour and Graphitint pencils I used can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

End of summer - the Viburnum has berries

The end of the long, hot summer is here and most of the days the weather is inviting for a walk. Very close to my home is the 'Alblasserbos' so we don't have to take the car to get to the beginning of our walk. The forest area itself has lots of oak trees, willows, beech trees and poplars, but the outer edges have bushes of all sorts. 
Amongst these bushes are some Viburnums and they are showing their berries now. The leaves are changing colour and are full of small holes, that may be due to the extremely dry summer we had this year.

I made some reference pictures with the idea to paint the berries and some of the leaves.
Of course I could have used a white background, but that was not what I wanted. The rest of the bush - and the other bushes standing next to this one - are suggested by the variety in green colours and some lines that suggest more leaves.
The background is done wet - in - wet and the suggested leaves are placed on a dry surface and faded with a little water.

I had applied masking fluid for the branches and it was not easy to fade the hard edges after removing the masking fluid. Maybe next time I will try to shape the branches by taking out the paint with a moist brush, so I can compare the results of both techniques.

The leaves and berries were left white and filled in later. Finding the right shade of green was the next 'problem' and I have added a bit more yellow and a brown to suggest the autumn colours that were visible in most parts of the bush. 
The berries had different colours, some very red, some a bit more orange. Finding the right colour mixes was not difficult. I added some suggestions of berries to the background.
The leaves were still not what I wanted, so I took one of my Line Markers and drew the leaf veins with it. The result was what I had hoped for and I decided to stop at this point.

The picture may not show the painting as it is, please tilt the screen a bit to see all the shades of green I have painted. 

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