Cats in (my) art - for a challenge

 

The March challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' is about animals in art. 

In my art animals are mostly cats, so I recycled some old sketches to a new 'collage' of cats and made the painting. After that I added some parts of silhouettes using a line marker.

The whole idea was that it would be sketch-like, no real portraits of the cats, those were made earlier.

This is a very small tribute to the cats that I was allowed to paint thin the last years.

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

Monday is wash day

 

The September challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' is about 'Monday is wash day' and my inspiration came from stories of cat owners in my family.

After the wash is dry, a nice stack of towels makes a very comfy place for a cat nap so that is what I have been drawing and painting. For this challenge I decided to keep it simple, not too many details and suggesting the table, the towels, the hanging wash and the cat just by their shapes and some shadows.

For this work I used watercolour and line markers in many colours, the information about these materials, the size of this work and its availability can be found in my Tumblr blog.

Delft - Market place

 

Due to the Vermeer exhibition in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam there is another Vermeer-themed exhibition in Delft. This one is very interesting as it gives the background information about Delft in Vermeer's time. 

After we had visited the museum, we walked through Delft and had a drink (tea and coffee) on the Market place with a view on the 'Nieuwe Kerk', another church (Maria van Jesse kerk) and some of the restaurants that are there. And trees!

The trees were just getting their foliage, so the colours were between a reddish brown, yellow and green and I really like the time of the year when trees are not only green. Making reference pictures was done quickly (the tea was still hot) but then...

Painting a lot of architecture makes me unhappy, I never can get all those straight lines as they ought to be in a painting - which is not as straight as they are in the reference picture.

So I made a pencil drawing of the buildings, added sky, foreground and trees with watercolour and used two line markers to re-draw the buildings, going over the pencil lines in many places and adding some shadows where the painting needed it. Using line markers on watercolour paper does not result in very straight lines, so this is what I wanted to do.

The result is even better than I hoped for, so I hope that now I have found 'my way' of dealing with architecture in a watercolour painting.

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

If you are interested in my work, please contact me.

A Leporello booklet

 

This time, Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken had found a new way to challenge us.
In the last weeks of January we all received a parcel with some watercolour paper, some materials, two art cards and an instruction. 

We had to try the materials ( a pencil, a line marker and a brush marker) first on the smallest piece of paper. There were also a folded card and a leporello of six pages in the parcel.

Next we had to pick one of the art cards, look at it for about a minute, put it away and start drawing on the first page of the leporello, inspired by the art card. The second day we had to use the second art card in the same way for inspiration and the other four pages of the leporello booklet had to be filled in four other days and we were free to choose our subjects. We only had to add something every day, that could be some materials, colours or addition to the image.

With these instructions I started working, but I did not spread the work over six days... It took me two days to finish this.

The first art card in my parcel was a picture of a flower, I made the flower and the bee - mostly because of the colour of the brush marker that was in my parcel. The second art card was a drawing of a church organ and that made me think of music or sound. So more bees were added, as many bees make a nice buzzing sound. The third had to be the honey - the words are in Dutch: 'bloemen honing' means 'flower honey'. As I used only half the space of the label, only half the words are visible.

Using the pencil I connected the images on all three pages.

The other side was for a tree branch - no surprise here - and again I used the pencil to connect the pages, even though I have made only one image. From left to right I have added more colours and some of my own materials (another liner marker and more brush markers) so what started as a black and grey drawing ends in colour. To connect both sides there are some very small bees that are interested in the blossoms. The bees also have a bit of the colour of the brush marker from the parcel.

I have not yet used the folded card, we are to make our own art card to send to a special person and for that I have not yet found the inspiration. That will come, sooner or later. The challenge was about the leporello book and that is finished.

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