Tree! - a Conté drawing

 

During the workshop morning with Pictura in the garden of the 'Dordrechts Museum' I sketched some of the trees there as these are old and impressive. 

There are three Platanus trees in that garden, that were already there when the Museum was founded, in the year 1904. These trees are maybe 200 years old and they look like their age. The trees are really large and as they are in a garden in an old city it is not possible to make a (reference) picture of the whole tree, they are too tall for that. 

The tree trunks have several bulges, maybe scar tissue where branches have been cut off. The lowest branch grows at least 3 meters above ground.

After I had made my sketch, I moved on to another tree and did not do much with this sketch. The sketch went to the exposition in the 'Pictura' building that ended over a week ago.

Now the sketch is back in my home - and my studio - I can work from it. The vertical lines in the sketch are showing the structure of the corrugated cardboard that we had to support our sheets of sketching paper.

It has been over two month that I was in that Museum garden and my memory of that tree has faded a little, there are no reference pictures, so the sketch is all I have to work with. 

This Conté drawing, using brown and earth colours on a light brown (naturel) background may not be an exact reproduction of the tree or the sketch, it does show what did attract my attention to this tree: the bulges on the tree trunk.

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

On the high 'Esch' - Delden, The Netherlands

 

Last month we (my husband and me) had a very short vacation in the province of Overijssel (Netherlands) where we did stay in a hotel in Delden. Just outside Delden is a nice restaurant placed on an 'esch'. I found a definition of 'esch' and that translates like: In Overijssel, Drenthe and Gelderland a vast, fertile piece of arable land, uninterrupted by hedges or walls, surrounded by the building farms of the owners.

Near the parking place of the restaurant begins a signposted walk and in the field between that path and the restaurant were some trees that were pruned to get an umbrella-like shape. I made reference pictures of these trees, but as it was raining and almost sunset, my pictures are not so great.

Still, one of these pictures is used as my inspiration for this watercolour painting. Choosing a limited palette of blues and browns I changed the mood a bit, but not much. It really was dark, wet and desolate and that little tree was all alone compared to the other trees. The tree is still in its winter sleep, so all the branches and twigs are visible against the grey sky and I think I painted them all. As mentioned, this tree was pruned to get a desired shape.

The result is what I hoped it would be, showing the atmosphere of a rainy late afternoon at the end of winter.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of this watercolour painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog. If you are interested in my original artworks, please contact me.

Rain is coming!

Autumn in The Netherlands can be a wet season. Wind and rain are normal these days and we usually take either raincoats or umbrellas with us when we go outside.
This was one of those days. We had a family reunion in the old harbor town of Elburg, in the northern part of the Veluwe. The old town is a protected area and outside the old city walls the landscape is rural. On one side is what remains of the once dangerous 'Zuiderzee', the Veluwemeer, a small lake between the 'old' and the 'new' land.

This somewhat overcast view attracted my attention so I made some quick reference pictures before it actually started to rain again. 

It may be autumn yet, not all trees have lost their green colours. There is a lot of yellow and brown visible already, promising more fantastic autumnal splendor to look forward to.

For this watercolour painting I decided to use a quarter of a sheet of paper and a limited palette of blues, yellows and a brown colour. I am getting used to mixing my shades of green from blue and yellow paints and I am more and more satisfied with the results of these mixtures. I just have to keep in mind that I want to use transparent blues and yellows for this and my greens will be nice and transparent too.

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