Water tower at the 'Spoorwegmuseum' - Conté drawing

 

This week we went to visit the 'Spoorwegmuseum' in the town of Utrecht and we were in the company of the grandchildren, their parents (of course!) and two guest children from France. The museum has many locomotives, trains, wagons and other material that has once moved over the rails in The Netherlands. 

Besides these there are also lots of information and modern trains - as a model - a simulator, some old rails and a workplace from the steam age.

That workplace shows the building as it was - we cannot really enter it, but we can look - and part of that is this old rusty water tower that inspired me to make this drawing.

This time I have also used Conté pencils, both for the colours and for the lines.

Because I was relatively far away from my subject when I made my reference picture, the building is not as detailed as it might be but as the water tower is my subject that does not really matter to me. Now the building is clearly the structure that has the tower on its roof.

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

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.

Dreaming of... visiting a museum

 

What would I do first after our lockdown restrictions are over? I think I would love to visit a museum, there is a nice exposition about trees in the museum nearby and I want to see those paintings. 

The twelfth week of the Weekly Lockdown Challenge (Artists&Illustrators Magazine) with the theme 'Going Out' inspired me to think about the subject and paint this watercolour.

Because we still have a lockdown and the museums are closed, I chose to paint a dream-like scene about a visit to the museum. 

The visitors are not really there, they are only dreaming. Or are they ghost-visitors, and is the museum itself dreaming about better days? I don't know, I only painted it.

The visitors were added after I painted the museum wall with the paintings that are in the exposition using white watercolour paint. White watercolour paint is not very opaque, so the original painting is still visible - as I wanted it to be. The pencil lines of the sketch could not be erased completely, so these have become part of the 'ghost' images of the visitors.

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