After the fire

 

During my painting vacation there was time for workshops, but also time to work as we wished to do. After I had used a picture of a skull last year to create a mixed media work, our teacher Ad van Aart brought some real animal skulls and bones with him this year for inspiration.

Drawing a skull from life is a bit different than using a picture, but I thought it clarifying . With a real skull in front of me, I can change my viewpoint to understand its structure which of course is not possible when using a picture.

The skull that inspired me is an animal skull found in Iceland and it belonged to a goat or sheep (that was not clear any more). I made a drawing using my watercolour pencils on a large sheet of paper and after this was finished I added trees with charcoal.  I decided to draw a burned forest, that seems to be the current state of a lot of forest areas.

These last weeks (months) there have been many forest areas on fire, mostly in the Southern parts of Europe, but also in North America and there is a huge fire going on in Siberia. These fires are alarming. I am not directly endangered by the fires or the smoke but the impact on the world climate is huge as we need the forests to cool down the  climate and slow down or even stop global warming, so I do feel uneasy about what's happening.

Now the mixed media work is finished, it seems to have become not only a drawing of a skull and a burned forest area. 

Something mythical has added itself to the atmosphere while I was working. 

These surprises are always welcome.

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

Castle Ruins

 

Last week I planned to work on watercolour underpaintings or painted backgrounds. This work is a Conté drawing on an underpainting, using a light, neutral colour to make the drawing stand out more.

During the painting week, our teacher and coach Ad van Aart took us to the castle ruins of Batenburg for inspiration. We only took our drawing or sketching materials with us, because we would not be there for more than two hours. 

The town of Batenburg is very small these days and the castle ruins are closed for the public but we had a good view from the other side of the moat and I made some sketches and reference pictures. 

One of the sketches was used for this drawing. On a light, neutral watercolour underpainting I used Conté Sketching Crayon applied in several layers to draw the round shapes of the ruins and the tangle of ivy plants hanging down from the broken walls. There are other plants growing, even a small bush growing from one of the buildings and I tried to draw them all, which is not really easy with a Conté Crayon.

The shapes of the ruins helped to create a composition beginning at the bottom on the left side and ending halfway on the right side of the paper (or the other way down of course) and the hanging ivy plants are the vertical composition lines.

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

Cows

 

Last week I had my painting vacation, which means that I was part of a diverse group of amateur artists that worked hard under the guidance of Ad van Aart, our teacher and coach, to improve our painting and art-making skills.

This year I planned to improve my skills in working on an abstract background. Maybe I just needed to improve my self-confidence but the result is the same. I worked hard for a week and I learned a lot.

The first day always starts with 'blind contour drawing' and one of the things I chose as a subject was a large group of cows in the meadow close by our location.

The group almost looked like one compact mass with lots and lots of legs and my contour drawing showed that image.

On an orange background made with several colours I painted that mass of cows using a contrasting colour. At this point I had a talk with our teacher and it was decided that I would add more structure to the group of cows, indicating the shapes of their backs and darkening some of the legs to suggest depth in the group.

After that was done, the shadows under the cows were painted using one of the colours of the background and the space above the cows was given more structure using the same colour. The shape above the cows is not so well defined so it could be a tree line or the shapes of clouds, that is 'in the eye of the beholder'.

Because this was relatively new to me - I have worked on a background like this before but I have never before painted cows - it took a long time and a lot of thinking before this was completed, but I am happy with the results I got this first painting day of my vacation.

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

Maasvlakte - sunset 3

 

During our walk by the shoreline at the Maasvlakte a few weeks ago I made a lot of reference pictures of the setting sun and I have already painted some watercolours. I did not make all the pictures standing up a bit from the waterline, I also made some pictures with a lower viewpoint, as low as I could get in a comfortable way (I wanted to stay dry and I had to get up without too much help) and for this watercolour I used one of those pictures.

There are some sandbanks a bit further away and these are only distinguishable from this point of view because there are no ripples. These sandbanks are not covered with water but very wet (almost quicksand) and they reflect the sunlight even better than the seawater around them.

The sun is almost touching the horizon and where the water is shallow the reflection of the sunlight is beautiful. The dark shapes are the waves rolling in, in backlight. I was crouching on a sandbank so there was water all around me - I did not want the beach to be visible in the reference picture.  After making a few pictures we had to leave, the sand was still too wet to hold us for a long time.

The painting is inspired by the reference picture and my memories of that walk so it is not an exact copy of reality (that's why it is a painting). 

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.

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.

Maasvlakte 2 - After sunset

Going to the beach to see the sunset means returning home after sunset. As we were on the beach of the Maasvlakte, we drove to the ship spotters point to look at the sea after sunset before going home and on the way we stopped to make pictures of the moon hanging over the port industry of the area of Maasvlakte 2. On Maasvlakte 2 the industry is mostly loading and unloading of container ships (the very big ones) so the lights come from the huge cranes that are built there. 

As the sun had just set, the moon had a pink shade and I have tried very hard to make good reference pictures of that view. Of course that was not really easy, making a picture after sunset means there is not much natural light left, but I got some nice reference pictures. I combined these pictures of the moon with the ones that had all the lights of the industry for the composition of this mixed media painting.

For this painting I started painting a dark blue background with a lighter spot where the moon was. The foreground of grasses and a bit of the road was painted in watercolours over that dark background. There is not much detail in the foreground only the suggestion of the landscape.

The moon and the lights are painted using white gouache and watercolour. As I have written before, the moon was not white, but slightly pink so I added a hint of pinkish orange to the moon. This was painted in several layers until I got the moon I wanted to paint. The industrial lights have yellow and orange shades when they are further away and I have used the same layering as I did for the moon to paint them.  There are some reflections of all those lights in the water that are painted with watery gouache and some hints of watercolour and the lines on the side of the road in the foreground are painted with very watery white gouache.

This was the first time that I have painted with white gouache over a dark watercolour background - I usually paint on heavy black cardboard - and for me the experiment turned out well. I know what to expect the next time and this small painting is just what I wanted it to be.

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

Maasvlakte - Sunset 2

 

Last week we (my husband and me) went to see the sunset at the nearest beach, the Maasvlakte (Netherlands) and I have already painted a watercolour after the reference pictures I had made and made a blog post about that painting and a small description of the landscape we found there.

This scene is as the sunset was seen from the dunes, where we sat down for a while to find some shelter from the wind. From that relatively high spot I made several pictures which showed a very broad view of the landscape because I used my phone, which has a wide angle lens. The advantage of this is that I can select any part of the picture for my painting as these pictures are very high quality - so 'zooming in' causes no problems with losing the high definition of the image.

For this painting I was inspired by the sunset colours (no surprise here), not only in the sky and the reflections in the water, but also on the sand of the dunes. In broad daylight the sand is almost white, but in these light conditions even the sand had a red colour which I like very much. I enjoyed it to paint this and find the right colour because there was also a shadow on the sand, cast by the single line of beachgrass that we passed on our way to a soft spot to sit down. 

The footsteps show we were not the first to find a resting place in that area during that day. These footsteps are softened a bit in the painting, because they are not my subject, but do make the composition more interesting. 

As the tide was retreating there still was a lot of water between the sandbanks forming little streams catching the last sunlight forming some very nice dark and light contrasts. In fact this is one of the things that made me choose this part of the reference picture for my painting.

Compared to my previous painting, the sunset colours are all more yellow-orange, that is of course because the sun was still higher when I made the reference picture.

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