Garden lamp in the snow - a drawing

 

This week we had snow - we still have a lot of snow lying in the garden, on the streets etc. The garden looks beautiful and two of the garden lamps look really 'brave' in this snow. (the other lamps are higher and are not buried in the snow)

Of course I wanted to draw this and I used graphite pencils and a fine liner for the lamp structure for this drawing. This turned out really nice and I enjoyed working on the drawing.

The information about the materials I have used, the size and availability of this work and - if you are interested in my original artwork - my contact information can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Getting Green energy

The 'model' for this little painting can be found in the Chinese Garden of "Diergaarde Blijdorp", the Zoo of Rotterdam. My daughter Mariska made some pictures for me a few years ago and these have been waiting for inspiration to come.
This lantern is in the middle of a pond and the holes in it made me think of fishing: the fishing rod fits nicely in there. 
The title refers to the energy source of the lantern. Of course that is electricity but the quest for sustainable energy sources is an important issue nowadays so my imagination came up with something 'green'. Not so very realistic but fun to paint.

This time I have been painting almost dry-on-dry, with just a little water and using small brushes and this is how I should paint on the Canson paper. It was easy now.
Because I have used concentrated Payne's grey for the dark lines I did not need to add ink lines. Another thing to remember for the next time.

More information about this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Confidentials

A new one in my series about lamps.
This is a garden light from my own garden and there are crocuses in my garden now. 
I combined them to make this scene and I enjoyed composing this painting even more than painting it.
I have used the Canson paper again and struggled with it - again. It seems as if the paint does not bind to the paper at all so adding a second or third layer of paint to deepen the colour of an area is not easy, because the first layer is on the move when a moist paintbrush is used. I have been using my hairdryer very much for this painting.
After I had the dark background / night sky as good as how I wanted it to be I did not have the courage to paint the lamp with a brush so I used my Watercolour Markers to draw it in place. The crocus could be painted with a brush because I had kept the area where it was to stand untouched. 

More information about this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Howling to the full moon

When I was thinking of scenes that can be painted with lamps, the idea of street lanterns howling to the full moon also came up. So this was to be my next project!

For the background I used the darkest colours I could find and with these I tried to create a night sky with clouds and a full moon. There had to be a street level somewhere and I thought that leaving light spots would suggest pools of water - as if it had been raining.
Making these dark colours flow and stay on the surface is not easy, most of the background is more or less painted. Using more water would have washed away the paint that I had already applied.
The lanterns were 'lifted' with a damp brush. That was easy as expected after my efforts for the background.  The moon was shaped with the aid of a small candle holder and I painted in some clouds and of course the shadows on the moon.
After that all was really dry I used two shades of red to shape the lanterns and some white to show the lights.

As I am using the last bits of study-quality paper this time I chose a square format. This also gave me the space I wanted for this scene. Now the moon is in the painting, not on the edge of it. The street lanterns are at a nice level now and there is some suggestion of a (wet) pavement on the foreground. 

For this painting I have had a lot of very helpful feedback from my daughter Mariska. This type of painting is fun to do, but I am relatively new to it, so a little help may be asked and given. Thank you very much Mariska!!!!

More information about this watercolour painting (size, paper and paint used, etc) and my other lamp-paintings can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Lamps, watercolour and other things

During my last painting vacation in the Ardennes I was introduced to Expressionism.
The result was a rather strange looking beer bottle (it was meant to be like that)  and the feeling that expressionism is not really my style. 
That morning I had also made a sketch of a standing lamp in the house we were staying. That lamp was transformed with the help of the shapes that originate from random splashes of watercolour paint that are dropped on a wet surface. The result of that experiment was also published in one of my blog posts about my painting vacation.

The idea of transforming the original shape of a standing lamp using the random shapes of watercolour that has been free to flow and mix stayed with me. No wonder, it was really fun to do and does not take much time to execute.

So I decided to use my own standing lamp as my model and try again. This time a different set of colours and a 'reason' for the transformation of the shape of the lamp. Spider season is upon us now, so there was the 'reason'. The colours I chose are looking forward to autumn: yellow, orange, red and a dark blue. Once again I used one of my Professional Watercolour Markers for the lamp, only the glass part was suggested by Indian Ink. The spider and his web are also drawn with Indian Ink.

Of course I have planned this concerning the materials I have used and the spider theme, but the final shape of the scene was dictated by the lines and shapes that were formed by the wet paint and the water - with a little help of gravity of course.

This was fun and I have many more ideas so after I have had time to buy me more of the paper I am using for these little paintings you will definitely see more lamps showing up in my artwork!

More information about this painting and the other one I have made in this style can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com