Another memory from our last vacation in The Ardennes. At this point we have left the village of Fauvillers behind us and are almost entering the Forest of Anlier. Before we really are between the trees we just have to follow this path downhill.
This vacation I have been making my own reference pictures - usually my husband makes them on my request as he is holding the camera.
I chose this scene because I was inspired by the lines of the fencing, the bushes and the path. The electricity poles and cables add to this as well.
This picture was taken a few hours after sunrise and the sky was still a bit gray. (later that day we would have sunshine, blue skies and some clouds)
For the painting I chose a small size (1/4 sheet instead of 1/2 sheet) because the scene 'asked' for that approach.
Some details like the electricity cables, the wire in the fencing and some of the grasses are made with my Professional Watercolour Sticks. As expected I have experienced that they are great for drawing these details, like the dry brush technique they can give the dashed lines I want.
Painting this one was fun for me! More vacation memories are waiting to be painted so you can expect some great views and forest scenes in the next weeks.
More information about this watercolour painting (materials used, size, availability, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
We have been walking the first day of our short vacation in The Ardennes. On the Internet we found a walk of 12 km that started in the village of Fauvillers and went downhill, passed along the river Sûre, crossed some more hills, the Forest of Anlier and returned to the village of Fauvillers again.
At this point we were still full of energy, as we had just left the village behind us. Looking back I decided to make a picture of the view we had on the village church and some of the houses. Most of the village is hidden behind the bushes and trees but what is visible is just nice for a painting.
Fauvillers is situated on top of the hill and we had to walk down to the valley of the Sûre.
This is very close to the village, so the hillside is filled with fields where at some points cows were grazing.
The light was a bit strange that morning. By the sea the sky had been grey all day, due to Sahara sands and dust from forest fires in Portugal and Spain blowing over with an autumn storm. We just had a little bit of the dust and a grey sky in the morning, some of my pictures show a grey sky with a yellow shade, depending on the angle of the camera. Later that day the sun would be really warm and the sky was blue again.
The fields were still green, the bushes and trees are beginning to turn orange and brown.
For my painting I only used yellow and blue colours, with Burnt Sienna for the autumn colours and to mix the grey colours of the buildings.
As the sky was overcast, there are no strong shadows, only under the bushes and in the uneven parts of the fields some dark areas can be found.
I am still experimenting with mixtures of blue and yellow colours, for this painting I have used a yellow paint I had just bought and had not used before. With every painting I make in this way I am learning and enjoying my decision to 'forget' the ready-made greens more and more.
More information about this watercolour painting (paper and paint used, size, availability, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
Summer has ended rather suddenly this year with storms, rains and cold weather in the early part of September. That is not the way it was in the last years but it does give me time to be in my little studio and paint.
We spent one of the last beautiful afternoons outside.
We went to a small Natural Reserve near the border with Belgium, the "Oude Buisse Heide" near the village of Zundert. This is a nice spot for a walk, we chose a signposted walk of about 4 km and we passed through a lot of different landscapes. I have made several reference photographs for later use and this is the first watercolour painting I have made.
We had been walking in between fields and a part of the heath that gives the Reserve its name. Looking back to where we came from I decided the view was worth a painting and stopped to make several photographs for reference.
The bushes on the left mark the ending of the heath, the fields on the right are grazed by cattle and have an uneven surface with several kinds of grasses, some flowers and small bushes. The path bends to the right and the different fields are separated by lines of wickets that have some higher grasses growing under them. I think the wires between the wickets are under electrical voltage to keep the cattle inside.
We had a cloudy day and most of the time no direct sunshine, so there were no distinct shadows on the path.
Again I have mixed all the green colours in this scene from yellows and blues. This is getting easy as I am having much more experience - and not to mention much more blues and yellows on my palette.
For the grey colours in the sky I have not mixed a grey using blue and brown, this time I used small amounts of Payne's Grey, just to see if that would give a satisfactory result. For this scene it proved to be perfect, so I will certainly do this again.
More information about this painting (size, paper and paints used, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
A charcoal drawing can be a bit too much black (and white) when you want to draw a landscape. So I have been experimenting with techniques to introduce some colour to a charcoal drawing. I was really happy with the results I got using a watercolour underpainting on watercolour paper but sometimes that is not what I am looking for.
Then, browsing on the internet I found Tinted Charcoal pencils. In the instruction videos they are used for the whole drawing, but I just want to add them to my charcoal.
I decided to give these pencils a try to see how they can be used in my artwork.
This is the result of my first attempt: the scene on the Kalmthoutse Heide was back-lit, so the silhouettes are strong and dark, perfect for a charcoal drawing. I added the colours of the grasses on the left with my pencils, and very little pine-green in the tree. So most of the drawing is made with my charcoal stick and I added the colours later.
Working with these pencils is different than working with a stick of charcoal, the marks can be blurred with my fingers, but not so easily as the charcoal. Of course that is because they are pencils and I just have to get used to them. I have got the tin with all 24 colours, so I have plenty of opportunities to experiment with my new pencils.
More information about this charcoal drawing and all the watercolour paintings I made inspired by the Kalmthoutse Heide can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
The mystery of the moors in foggy weather really intrigued me.
Most of the times when we are hiking I am not the person holding and using the camera, this time I made a lot of reference pictures because I kept seeing things that were inviting me to paint.
As it was not only foggy but also cold we did not stop for sketches, only pictures.
At this point we were walking towards a crossroad - as can be seen by the trees standing there. A bit beyond the crossroad the trees were gone again as if only that point was to be made seen by the trees.
In winter the heather plants are dark and brown, the grasses are golden yellow and the trees are dark because of the moist. At this point the sand was a bit red - not yellow or the grey colour I saw in other spots.
Therefore I could use a limited palette of four colours, something I feel very comfortable about. The haziness caused by the foggy circumstances gives me a good exercise in wet-in-wet painting, creating even softer edges than I normally do. Only the foreground is a bit sharper than the rest of the scene, but I really tried not to overdo that sharpness.
I do not have the ambition to make a photo-realistic painting, I try to paint how it felt to be at that spot, at that moment, in that weather, in that season.
With this watercolour painting I think I am very close to what I wanted to paint.
More information about this painting (size, colours and paper used, etc) and the others I made inspired by the 'Sallandse Heuvelrug' can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
That walk over the foggy moorlands of our Natural Reserve 'Sallandse Heuvelrug' was really inspiring me to paint the scenes we saw.
As I wrote in my previous post, the fog stayed all day, but at some moment a very pale sun came visible - for a short while. I managed to make a nice picture that would serve me as a reference for that moment.
At that time we were at a spot with a little more trees in the neighborhood and several bushes a little further away. The yellow grasses were separated by tracks and patches of dark earth.
I made this watercolour - a small size as we were still in our 'vacation home' - to compare this technique with the charcoal drawing I made earlier.
For this watercolour painting I used the same three colours that were used to make the underpainting for the charcoal drawing. Using French Ultramarine and Vandyke Brown I can make the grey of the foggy sky and the bushes that are further away. The trees close by are made with the same colours, only now a stronger mixture. Gold Ochre is for the wintery grasses, for the fields in the distance made a bit more grey with the Ultramarine.
There were some clouds visible and the outline of the sun is not so strong, this is typical for this kind of weather in The Netherlands.
Once again I had fun painting this scene and it was nice to compare both techniques.
I still don't know which I prefer - which one I will use in the future may depend on my mood.
More information about this watercolour painting (materials used, size etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
Last week - between Christmas and New Year's Eve - we went for a short vacation to one of the Natural Reserves of The Netherlands; the 'Sallandse Heuvelrug'.
The next bit of text is information I copied from the English Wikipedia page about the region:
The Sallandse heuvelrug is a moraine, created in the one but last glaciation, Saalien, 150.000 years ago. During the Holocene forests started to develop, but after the growth of the human population, these forests had been cut. From the Middle Ages onwards the area was used for grazing by sheep and goat, and the upper layer of the soil was removed to use it as fertilizer for the crop fields. In this period, the area became a heathland because of sand-drifting. In the beginning of the 20th century the state started forestry programs, to prevent this erosion and to produce pine wood. The area is well known for its scenery because of its relatively large heathlands.
We had visited this National Reserve only once, so we decided to spend more time here to walk, explore and make pictures.
The first day of our visit the weather was fine, we had some clouds and sometimes a clear sky. As the sun sets early in winter, we had beautiful views of the colouring of the sky through the branches of the trees.
The reference picture for this watercolour was made by me.
I painted this watercolour in the evening in our vacation home. Because of that it is a small size and not a very challenging subject. Just a nice little painting to reflect the mood of the afternoon walk we made.
There were more pictures of course, with scenes that need a bit more thought and preparation before I paint them. So there is more to come!
More information about this watercolour painting (materials used, size, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
Sometimes I like to paint mushrooms and for that purpose I have a lot of reference pictures, taken for me each autumn.
The reference picture for this painting is taken by my husband, about three years ago. We were on a walk in the forests of Sauerland - in Germany. There were lots and lots of mushrooms in all possible colours.
These looked a bit grey on green moss. The moss is something I never achieved as I like it to be so this time I decided to make a very different background.
When I was looking carefully at the mushrooms to draw them correctly I saw the grey was actually a bit violet and a bit orange. So the mushrooms have been painted in those two colours. I added the twigs in order to connect the mushrooms and make it one painting instead of several 'portraits of a mushroom' on one sheet of paper.
Unfortunately it was hard to make a good picture, the real painting has a bit more red in its overall impression.
More information (size, colours and paper used etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
After our walk around the Naardermeer - now two months ago - I started painting watercolours and drawing with charcoal after all the pictures we made.
Those paintings are already posted here, with numbers 1 to 8 and some extra because I painted some scenes twice.
The trail is indicated on a map and I added numbers to indicate where my paintings were inspired. In one of my previous posts I already mentioned that I was doing this and would show the map when I considered it (almost) complete.
So here it is!
For now I will stop painting after the pictures we made around the Naardermeer, mostly because next week I will be on a short painting trip in the Ardennes and will get loads of inspiration there.
More information about all the paintings I made with the Naardermeer as my inspiration can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
The trail around the 'Naardermeer' is about 20 km long so there is a lot of variety in the landscape.
I have already painted the lakes themselves, a small patch of forest, some marshlands and now I have painted fields with oxen and a very large tree, I think it may be an old oak tree.
The combination of the standing tree, the fallen one and the large animals scattered over the area inspired me to paint this scene. I had to gather some courage because I usually don't include animals in my paintings, so even though we saw this scene very soon after we began our walk, it is the seventh scene I am painting.
It was not really difficult to paint them, it is not easy to make an accurate drawing on the surface of my watercolour paper.
The sky looks still light, the darker clouds I have painted in my other paintings came in shortly after the moment we were looking at these fields.
More information about this watercolour and the other paintings I made after our walk around the 'Naardermeer' can be found at my new website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
Only shortly after we walked by the scene I painted with the number 4 we saw a predator hunting. My husband used all he could get out of the camera and made the picture that inspired me to do this painting.
We have been looking at both pictures he could make of the bird but we could not exactly determine the species. We think is is a harrier, but that is just a guess.
Different species of harriers are known to visit or even breed in the area of the Naardermeer so our guess could be right.
The picture is zoomed in a lot so the dark clouds in the background were large. I did pour some diluted paint over my wet paper and let it dry completely. After that I used the resulting pattern to make my clouds. After the clouds were dry I used water-soluble pencils to draw the lines of the railroad's electricity supply and the bird. Using a little bit of water I put emphasis on the bird.
This was a bit of an experiment for me, using both paint and pencils but this technique suited my subject best.
More information about this painting and the others I made after our walk around the Naardermeer can be found at my new website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
This is a second version I made from a sketch I used earlier and this time I wanted to do a painting on a black background. Using white gouache and my watercolour paint I can create a painting that is very different from a watercolour on a white background.
Until now I used this technique only for night scenes, with this painting I tried a daylight scene.
I am really pleased with the result.
The technique is something I still am getting used to, but my experience is growing and problems are solved much more easily than in the first paintings I did this way.
These paintings are not so easy to picture for the purpose of showing them in this blog and other things. The light has to be good enough and my daughter has to be home to make the picture for me, my camera is not up to this task.
More information about this spot along the walk around the 'Naardermeer' is found in the blogpost with the watercolour painting I made earlier.
More information about this painting (paint and paper used, etc) can be found at www.jannekesatelier.tk
The walk around the 'Naardermeer' is marked counter clockwise and starts at the most southern point. First you walk the eastern edge of the area which is lined by high trees, bushes, fields with cattle and a few farmhouses.
As it was springtime, all the trees and bushes were showing fresh green colours and some of them were in bloom, like the chestnut trees and the hawthorn bushes. In the fields were lots of flowers showing their yellow, white or violet colours. The grasses themselves bloom with a reddish brown haze.
Altogether great to look at and not so easy to paint, as I do not want to show all the details, but the impression of the scene.
This was a peaceful spot with a very gentle feeling with lots of green, birds singing and sheltered from the wind.
I tried to paint this impression and I think I succeeded.
More information about this watercolour and the others I painted inspired by our walk around the 'Naardermeer' can be found at www.jannekesatelier.tk
The walk around our Natural Reserve Naardermeer is about 20 kms long and there is a nice variety in views, landscapes, vegetation and animals.
This time I found some information on the site of the owner of the Naardermeer: Natuurmonumenten (Natural Reserves) an organisation for the protection of our nature.
"The reserve of Naardermeer consists of several lakes, such as the Great Lake and the Wijde Blik. Around it lie swamps and marshy meadows with shallow ponds. Numerous animals and plants take advantage of these wet conditions."
The reference photo for this watercolour was taken (by myself) from a lookout point overlooking the lake called 'Naardermeer' (which the reserve is named for) where it is about to flow into the 'Grote Meer'. (The Dutch word 'meer' means lake.)
I was attracted by the clouds, the reeds, the water and the bushes nearby to show the depth in the scene.
More information about this watercolour and the other one I painted after our walk around the Naardermeer can be found at www.jannekesatelier.tk
My website had to change address due to circumstances beyond our control.
The first time we saw this landscape it was foggy weather. So when the fog lifted after a few days we could see much more of the autumn colours this part of the Veluwe has to offer. And we all had a very pleasant surprise!
The sky was still cloudy, but opening up with bright red/orange and patches of blue.
The trees were changing from green to a reddish brown and the heather lost their flowers but still had a lot of violet to be seen.
As I explained earlier, we were in a moraine so the landscape is not as flat as the rest of The Netherlands. We were walking on the top of the hills and looking at the scene below us when my daughter Mariska made the reference photo I used for this painting.
More information about this painting (size, colours used) can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr
A walk in the woods can be very refreshing - if only because of the fresh air and the exercise involved. We usually take at least one camera with us, so we return with lots of pictures and I am inspired to start painting as soon as possible.
Not all scenes are fit to be painted in watercolour, so this one has become a charcoal drawing.
Those nice tall trees are standing in 'de Renderklippen' which is a part of our National Reserve de Veluwe. We had some nice walks there and I got inspiration for a few more watercolour paintings!
More information can be found at www.jannekesatelier.co.nr
