Almost Autumn!

 

After a hot and dry summer my chestnut tree is dropping his leaves early - as many other trees do - and the chestnuts are ready to fall off the tree. So it is time to paint an autumnal watercolour painting using my own tree as my model. 

For this painting I decided to make a brown background by letting two shades of brown flow on my wet paper. This did not cover the whole sheet and that is exactly what I wanted.

The composition is made using my two reference pictures. After the initial drawing was made I have used my memory for the colours and because the leaves, branches and chestnuts are painted over the background these colours are part of the end result.

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.

Deelerwoud - Along fields and roads

 

The September challenge of 'Goed Gezien - Goed Bekeken' is 'Along fields and roads' and we are asked to paint our vacation pictures, only I did not make nice pictures of fields and roads, only fields...

So I selected a nice picture of our signposted walk in the Deelerwoud last October (2021) with a field and the path we were walking in a nice composition. The background is a forest area and the trees next to the path are a welcome addition to the view, even though some of them died a long time ago. 

The grasses were already yellow, the trees still had most of their foliage and there was a nice dark sky, it rained lightly during our walk. Together this had a very nice autumnal mood and we enjoyed being there at that time. Now I am happy to remember that walk, using the pictures I made as reference for my watercolour paintings.

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

What remains...

 

During our short stay in the Northern part of Germany we spent one day visiting the dolmens in that area and making several pictures of these ancient structures.

Most of the dolmens we saw were surrounded by trees, even though there was some open space - sometimes even a fence - around the stones, but I wanted to paint one of these dolmens without the nice springtime mood that these trees were bringing to my pictures. The inspiration to make a painting in a misty autumnal mood came during my painting vacation, but that week was too short to make all the paintings I wanted too.

So I imagined the dolmen standing alone, in an empty area as if the trees are yet to grow and I created a misty autumn day. The sky is grey, but not too dark - we have these days in autumn - and the ground is dark as well, only greys and earth colours.

While painting, I did not look at my reference picture any more (I had used it for my preliminary drawing) and worked from memory, creating dark and light areas on the stones, creating cracks that in reality are not there (yet) and suggesting some kind of structure in the ground the dolmen is standing on. That last bit was the most challenging, as I did not want to introduce any bushes or other greens. Finally I decided on the possibility of a circle around the dolmen and some indications of the small hill it sits on.

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.

Shadow Play

 

During our painting vacation, the weather was nice and dry, but really hot. Too hot to make two watercolour paintings a day, so some afternoons were used for other things, like drawing in the shadow.

This work is all about drawing the shadows. I took a place under a walnut tree and tried to draw the shadows of the leaves using my Conté Sketching Crayons. There was some wind, so it was not easy. After the first, dark layer I added a second and a third layer, each one a lighter shade. The final layer was just the outline of the shadows in white.

After I had done this drawing, I changed to another tree:

My colour scheme for this drawing was more simple, only one black and the final layer in grey.

With the first sketches on paper I asked our teacher and coach Ad van Aart how to continue because this was a first time for me. He advised me to add colour to the layers in the first drawing and to work on the composition of the second one.

The first shadow play is now stronger in colour, the shapes are better defined and the white lines are visible and a bit intriguing now.

The second shadow play is more balanced now the shapes are connected and the grey shapes are more scattered over the whole sheet of paper.

This was a first time for me, but I really wanted to do this at least once. In fact I love the result and knowing what to do to make the composition stronger / better I will certainly try this again, with different shadows and perhaps different drawing materials.

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

Misty landscape

 

For the last day of my painting vacation our teacher and coach Ad van Aart asked me to make another misty scene, this time with some reference pictures. After searching on the Internet, I found some nice misty landscapes that are not so close to where I live so I could not have seen these myself. 

It was still hot, so I started with a wet paper, painting a background colour and adding the structures in the background as soon as possible with a very thin mixture of a grey shade. Adding the rest of the landscape in darker shades of grey layer by layer was not easy as the paper dried very fast, but I managed to get a credible result. 

The next stage was the lake and the mist coming from the water, but I have painted the reflections as the landscape that is painted has to reflect in the water and the waves or ripples are also only suggested, not copied from any of the pictures I used for inspiration.

My landscape does not look like the references I have used as my inspiration any more. The high temperatures and the short drying time of my paint and paper forced me to improvise and create a landscape that could be existing somewhere.

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.

Tree roots - a charcoal drawing

 

The days of my painting vacation were not completely filled with my watercolour paintings, in the afternoons I occasionally had a few hours for something different. Of course I wanted to stay close to my chosen subject (the forest) so one afternoon our teacher and coach Ad van Aart  asked me to make a drawing of the complex roots of a large oak tree that was on the terrain of our residence.

With this drawing I had to fill the whole page as good as possible and create a work that was as close to abstract as the subject could get me. I did make a drawing as accurately as possible, filling the page with the roots of the tree and only the roots. So no little branches, no grasses in the background and even not the little mouse that came looking what I was doing in front of its home.

Making this drawing was nice, I could sit on a small chair in the shadows of the tree - it was a very hot day - and concentrate on what I did see and what I wanted to draw without having to worry about drying paint, colour choices and other difficulties. The result is even better than what I thought I could make, so I am very happy that Ad challenged me to do this.

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

The Forest Floor

 

After I had painted different seasonal moods using only one reference picture it was time for something different, still based on the 'forest' theme. 

Together with our teacher and coach Ad van Aart I selected a step-by-step tutorial about painting the forest floor in Pastel to use as my guideline for this watercolour painting. The result does not look much like the reference in the tutorial. What I have taken from the reference are a background, trees, a light spot and some growing plants on the forest floor. Making a watercolour painting is very different from making a pastel painting, so the step-by-step instructions could not be followed by me.

Because of the light spot. I had to decide the direction of the light to place my shadows and the dark sides of the trees. Some shadows are not included, these are behind the unevenness in the forest floor. 

The result is a mostly imaginary landscape and I am really happy with it. The experience of painting a landscape, using a reference only as a guideline was a nice one and I love to repeat this way of working in the future.

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.