These last weeks I have been painting leaves, branches, berries and acorns and I tried to make compositions that could be seen in nature. For those compositions I have looked at reference pictures and arranged my shapes in a way that suggest 'natural'.
When I am working like this for a while I keep doing the same thing - one painting with acorns, another might be about chestnuts and so on.
To break through this I decided to make a composition of autumn leaves as they might have fallen on the ground after a strong wind.
I have used the shapes of the leaves of the hawthorn, the oak leaves and the leaves of the sycamore tree that were in my last paintings. With these shapes I filled a page in my sketchbook, sometimes erasing, most of the times adding more until I was happy with the result.
For the watercolour painting I have made a single layer background with Raw Sienna and added the leaves, using a lot of different shades of yellow, brown and red.
This took me longer than usual, but it was worth the time I spent on this painting, I have enjoyed working on this composition and the result is better than I hoped it would be.
This month I have been working with red, orange and yellow because I wanted to explore these colours a bit more. A landscape painting often is in shades of blue and green with some brown added when there are trees and that became too much of a habit to me. Green and blue are 'calming' colour shades and I wanted a change.
Red and orange are more 'uplifting' colours and yellow is like sunshine on my paper. I have started to work with these colours during my painting vacation and now I am still exploring the possibilities. My inspiration has not stopped, so there will be more red, orange or yellow paintings in the future.
The details about paper, paint, size and availability of this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
In my previous post I already foretold that I would be using the same composition sketch again, now using different background colours. This is what I had in mind, a painting with the leaves standing out against a background with more dark browns.
For this watercolour painting I have made a single layer background in light ochre colours and made a drawing of my sketch on that background. Then I started to darken the areas around the leaves and acorns with a dark brown and strengthened the Burnt Sianna in the background.
The shapes of the leaves were now accentuated by adding shadows and the branches and acorns were painted.
At this point I decided I was happy with the result.
The last few paintings I did were using a much more 'complicated' background and the subject was added with darker shades of the colours I had used.
This time the background was darkened around the subject, resulting in light coloured leaves that still have the colour scheme of the initial ochre background.
When this painting is compared to the previous one there is a big difference in the resulting atmosphere. I really like to be experimenting like this with all the colours I have gathered over the years and I am still learning with every painting I make.
The details about paper, paint, size and availability can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
This is another watercolour painting in which I am experimenting with composition and a colour schemes that is mostly yellow.
I have been adding darker colours for contrast from the beginning and I am expanding the palette I am using - the first paintings had only four colours, this one has six colours of which four shades of yellow or ochre.
Last painting vacation I have started painting like this because I wanted to find 'my way' of painting flowers and our teacher Ad van Aart guided me in this direction. Back at home I have continued painting in this style as much as possible.
This really feels like 'my way' and I am really happy with these paintings.
For this painting I knew I wanted to paint acorns so I made some reference pictures of branches with leaves and acorns during the last walk in the park. My husband Peter held the branches for me, to help me making the pictures I needed. (No tree was hurt or damaged in the process)
Using these pictures I sketched some acorns and leaves, giving me references for the shapes I wanted to combine for my composition.
The composition sketch was made with great care, thinking, looking and adding or erasing shapes until I was satisfied.
The yellow background was painted first in two layers that did have time to dry completely. I have used three shades of yellow for the background. After this was completed - or I did not what to make any more changes and just work with the result I already had - I decided which side was top and which would be bottom and started drawing the composition using a watercolour pencil.
And then the leaves, acorns and branches were painted. I wanted the leaves to be visible, but they should not stand out too much as the acorns were to be the subject of the painting.
At this point I asked for a second opinion (my daughter this time) and we both declared the painting finished.
In the near future I may use the composition sketch for another painting, making variations in the background colours and values.
The details about this painting (paper and colours used, size, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
September has begun and with that comes not only the end of the summer vacation for our schools (my husband is a teacher) but also the new challenge of Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken. In January I had decided that I would participate in every (monthly) challenge so this is my contribution for September.
The theme is 'Storm' and I had to think of something new. I have painted lots of stormy skies but I want to make something new for every challenge.
As I am still in the mood for leaves, fruits and flowers this is a combination of a stormy sky and a composition of leaves and some fruits of one of the sycamore trees (Acer pseudoplatanus) that are growing in a park area near our home.
The landscape is imaginary, in the sense that I have not really seen this, but the line of trees, the bushes and the field are something that really can be found in our landscape. The leaves and little 'helicopter' fruits that are blowing in the wind are a sight that can be seen here also - when the winds are strong enough.
This was fun again, painting an imaginary landscape combined with things I learned about composition during my painting vacation and I am really happy with the result.
Details about the materials I have used for this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
After I have been painting flowers last week and one more after returning home I was looking for inspiration again while we were walking in a park. There were not many flowers left and the berries on the bushes were attracting my attention. That is why I made some reference pictures of the fruits of the hawthorn bushes we were passing.
I like the hawthorn bushes, in springtime they have wonderful flowers, the whole bush seems to turn white and their fruits are early as well, now is the end of summer in our country (Netherlands) and the bushes and trees of the hawthorn are already showing more red fruits than green leaves in some places.
Using my reference pictures I have been making a composition of the shapes of some of the leaves and some groups of berries. For my colour scheme I decided on a mixture of reds and browns to make it look like an autumn painting.
The background was painted first in a few layers and I already took care to leave a light spot where the group of berries would be painted.
The composition was drawn on my background - I really do draw this again, so mistakes and corrections are possible and I can adapt my composition to the size of my paper when that is necessary.
Using the colours of my background and one extra shade of red I painted all the leaves, berries, bits of branches and of course I added shadows and saved the highlights.
These last few weeks I am exploring the colour combinations I can make with the paints that are in my collection. I like to paint using harmonious colour schemes and though these kind of paintings often need a contrasting colour for depth, shadows or defining shapes I am happy that most of the paintings I have made these last weeks are what I hoped them to be or sometimes even better.
The details about paper, paints and size of this watercolour painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
Back home again after a week of painting and learning means driving home in the first place, washing clothes, putting all painting stuff in their places in the little studio and posting my artwork on my website, blog and Instagram.
In short, there is a bit of a distance between the vacation and where I am now, not only because of the three hours drive home. I have returned to normal life again.
I still want to continue painting like I have done last week under the guidance of Ad van Aart and there is a deadline for a challenge.
The August challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' (the amateur art association of which I am a member) is all about coming home after a vacation or any other trip.
So what do I come home to?
Lots of things, but in this case I found a very patient model in the cucumber plant in my garden. I have sketched flowers, leaves and one cucumber and made a composition out of these shapes that would fit on the sheet of paper I have chosen for this painting.
There were some more shades of yellow to experiment with and I have chosen to paint the leaves in the green shades that appear when a grayish blue is mixed with one of my yellow colours.
The yellow background did interfere with the mixtures of green, as was to be expected. That is one of the nice challenges of watercolour, the background colour will always be part of the result.
I have tried to return to that 'state of mind' I was in during that wonderful week in Milonga and I think I could do that quite well. Now I have to make my decisions (about composition, these are the ones that still make me feel insecure) all on my own, without any help from a teacher, but I just want to be able to do this, so I have to practise!
Last Saturday I left France with a lot of ideas so I will continue painting in the weeks to come and I hope I will lose my insecurities about composition while painting.
The details about the materials I used and other information can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
This is the last painting I made while I was in Milonga, taking lessons from Ad van Aart.
For my yellow painting I prepared a composition with the shapes of leaves, flowers and buds of the hedge bindweed and selected a section for that painting.
During a few moments spare time I coloured the leaves outside that section of my sketch and that inspired my teacher to suggest that I should paint the whole sketch in this fashion.
So I made a drawing of the whole sketch on my watercolour paper and taped the inner section before making an orange background. I used three layers of paint to achieve a nice background. Then I started painting the shapes of the leaves, buds and flowers that were in the orange section of my paper, using dark brown colours that were also in the background.
After this was dry, I removed the tape and started to draw the lines of the shapes inside the 'white' section with Graphitint pencils. When water is applied to those lines they change colours and the pencil lines can flow out a little. I have used that for the leaves and buds inside the white section. For the flowers I added another colour of Graphitint pencil and I have applied water here as well.
The lines that give the flowers their shape were put in last, on completely dry paper.
While working on this one, I closely looked at my composition, some lines and marks that were not planned initially were added to make the painting as perfect as possible.
This one was hard work, mostly on the composition part but again I have learned a lot and I will be doing more like this at home, in my own studio.
There are more variations on this theme to be explored and I am really looking forward to all the possibilities that lie in front of me.
More information about this painting can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com
