Blueberries

That's right... Blueberries... What you see here is my blueberry palette. Pretty eh? Too many colours though. In fact you can paint them with four colours. I just tried out several paints to pick the best combination. I can't remember exactly which ones I prefered in the end. I think it might have been French Ultramarine, Burnt Umber, Quinacridone Magenta and Mineral Violet or something like that. Perhaps I used some Hooker's Green for the shadows (mixed with the magenta it gives a really dark colour). As you can see I also added a little bit of white to mix nice pale colours with for the bloom. That is also something I tested. How to get the best bloom. I can't say it was with the white mixtures or with white from the paper. Both ways worked rather well. I know, this post is not very helpful.... Just wanted to show you the pretty palette and the tiny result of 5 delicious berries... Made just for fun....

Talking about fun... See what happens when you flip the photo of the palette:

It's watching you! ;)

 

Grapes

I never painted grapes before. Neither did I draw them with pencils. I knew I could do them in coloured pencil. They are much like blueberries. And I did blueberries years ago. Getting the bloom just right was a wonderful challenge. When I bought these grapes I knew the bloom would be the most difficult bit. But I didn't want to do another coloured pencil drawing. I decided to try it in watercolour. Pretty scary to be honest. So first I tried one. It's the one in the front. It wasn't at all as hard as I thought it would be. It actually was quite fun. So I painted a small group behind the loose one. I tried out a few different techniques but they all resulted in the same nice surface. Funny enough the hardest part was to find out what colour to use in the shadows. I finally found sepia with a bit of permanent alizarine crimson the best choice.
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Finished Work

It has been far too long since I've blogged something. So, here's an update. Last year, the last two months I didn't paint much. I wasn't well for a while and we had a very busy December. At the end of the month however, I decided to try and enter my work to the SBA show in London, next April. I want to send 4 paintings but it was hard to choose which ones. Also I felt like I had to enter work that reflects my recent work. I think I improved my skills this year dramatically. The course I did with Anne-Marie Evans had a lot to do with that. I now feel much more comfortable with the watercolours.

I wanted to enter my Nectaroscordum striptease but it's a bit personal. I don't want to sell it yet. So I decided to repaint it in a smaller version. Instead of the 5 flower heads, I painted 3. Also I changed the composition. To put them in a row, like I did in the first version, seemed stiff. Not at all what I wanted. So I moved them around till I was, sort of, happy with it.

As you can see in the slideshow, I had a big problem with one of the buds. It was the bud closest to the viewer but it was so grey and dull and there was nothing I could do to make it look fresh again. All I could do was to cut out the top layer of the paper and carefully remove the entire thing. I then polished the damaged part with a small agate stone and repainted the bud, giving it more colour and enlarging it a bit so nothing could be seen of the *gap*.
Here is the finished piece:

I'm also still working on another painting. It's Allium ursinum (or Ramsons or Wild Garlic). I made a sketch of it two years ago but never got to actually paint it. I wanted to give it a go for the SBA show because I was really pleased with the composition. Now this Allium has, as you might know, white, small flowers and large leaves. I first tried a flower head on a small piece of paper to get the feeling of the white, the shadows and the shape.

Next came the leaves. That was even more difficult because they were huge and wavy. All I had was a line drawing. I never got to add the shades to the sketch. So I had to carefully think about where to place the shadows. I therefore made a new sketch of the leaves and added the shadows with a pencil. I'm glad I did because I'm sure I would have totally messed it up if I hadn't done it.

Now I should tell you I'm scared of painting leaves. If possible I avoid it :P But these leaves were really needed. I tend to paint them too fast, use too much water and because of all that, mess it up. I had to tell myself over and over again while I was painting to be slow and work dry. Sometimes I did, but sometimes I didn't.

I had to carefully build the leaves to keep them wavy, clean and fresh but also to add drama and depth. I first did the shaping wash and after that I added the fisrt green wash of bright yellow green.

Now I'm adding more and more layers of deeper green to finish the leaves, adding details where necessary. So... not finished yet but getting there.

The third I finished (yesterday) is a painting I started last year and is one of my all time favourites. It's Pelargonium sidoides. I'm not a fan of Pelargoniums but this one is different in many aspects. The flowers are tiny and have a beautiful deep, rich, dark, almost black kind of red. Like small gems. The leaves are not too big and have a velvety silver grey look. That is such a beautiful combination, it makes you sigh when you first see it. No really, it does!
In a nutshell this is how it was to paint it: The leaves were difficult (because velvety and many cushions) but they went remarkably well, the stems were so thin and took the longest to paint them well and the buds and flowers were obviously the most fun to paint.

I'm so happy with this painting. I love the composition and the way the leaves turned out. If I will sell it I would hate to see it go. But that's the danger isn't it? Maybe someday I'll paint something like this again. Who knows.
The fourth I want to submit is the old drawing of Crocosmia 'Lucifer'. That will be the only one in coloured pencil.

I'll try and make loads of photos at the show and will report on my blog how it was. Ta ta for now ;)

Playing with greens

Yesterday I was mixing greens. Just experimenting with my browns, yellows, blues and greens. I got some really nice colours but didn't do much with it. Rather stupid not to make something nice with it, I thought. So I started this little memory of a walk through the forest I took last year.

I used a reference photo too but didn't look too much at it. I think the greens I used are a bit more springtime than they actually were when I took that walk (October).
I never work this "free", it's a bit uncomfortable for me but sometimes it's nice to let yourself go and do something entirely different.

Blue

It's spring. That means a lot of blue flowers in my garden right now. Scilla, Muscari, Hyacinth and also the first Pulmonaria or Lungwort. I have many different variaties in my garden of this lovely perennial but today I painted one of my favourites. Pulmonaria angustifolia. It has extremely blue flowers (although the buds have a rich magenta colour) and the leaves are green (not variegated like most Lungworts). It was a quick study and a small one but I loved to try and catch that electric blue colour.

To get the right colour I used French Ultramarine, a bit of Violet and a little Paynes grey. To make the perfect colour for the shadow (in the blue) I mixed French Ultramarine with Cadmium Red. A wonderful mossy green I got by mixing Paynes Grey with Raw Umber. A really nice surprise that was :)

Carambolas

It has been too long since I posted something. I was just too busy taking care of sick children and going on a holiday. But yesterday I finally found some time to paint something again. On Flickr, in the *Watercolourist, Painting with light* group there was a nice challenge photo. Two carambolas (or starfruit). The colours were so bright. Green colours, almost toxic, you don't always see in nature. So I thought this would be a lot of fun to explore the greens.

I soon found that the best, most explosive green I could get was by mixing Winsor&Newton's Lemon Yellow and Hookers Green. For the shades I used Indigo, Caput Mortuum with the green. The browns were Raw Umber and some Burnt Sienna. Some small details were added at the end using a bit of Sepia.

Gosh, this was really fun!

Watercolours

As you probably know, I work a lot with coloured pencils. I never liked watercolours very much... or the watercolours didn't like me... I don't know. Anyway, painting with watercolours always was a struggle and never fun to do. I found my coloured pencil more friendly and willing to work with me. Lately I started to paint a bit more. I think it was after the botanical art course with Valerie Oxley this spring. She showed some tricks and ways how to deal with various problems. It inspired me to pick up my brushes again and try some small things. You've seen the Blackberry and Redcurrants. They worked out surprisingly well. I have no idea why it is going so much better than before. Maybe it's because I take my time and use less colours when I mix my colours. Lately I've done two more paintings. One large and one small and still in progress. Actually I think I won't finish it this year because I have other, more important, stuff to finish too. To be honest, the first, large painting, isn't finished either... here it is:

These are the berries of the Arum italicum. Now, I must add that these berries are no longer floating around. I've added the stem last weekend. The bright orange colours were very new for me. I never did something so extremely orange before. The most beautiful orange I got from mixing Opera Rose with Cadmium Yellow (both W&N). Some berries have some Cadmium Red deep hue glazed over them, some have a bit of Opera rose or Cadmium Yellow glaze. The green was even harder. It stayed too mossy... too yellow... finally I tried to make it better by glazing with a bit of Hookers Green mixed with Lemon Yellow. That did it.

The other painting is going to be a bit of a project. I started it last weekend while I was demonstrating Botanical painting in my favourite nursery "De Kleine Plantage" in Eenrum. In the gardens were a lot of Hydrangeas. The most spectacular colour of deep dark red I found on Hydrangea serrata 'Grayswood'.

I picked some of the most interesting flowers off the shrub (naughty me) and painted them.

Now I want to paint a lot more of these flowers with these amazing colours on the sheet. Like they are sprinkled on the paper. I think it will look very nice.

Now, I'm not going to switch over entirely to watercolours. I love the pencils too. But it was a nice surprise to see the painting is going so much better now, with less struggles and with more fun than before....

More progress

The last couple of days I've worked hard on my big Nectaroscordum drawing. Three of the flowerheads are now, more or less, finished. It's difficult and hard work. I made some photos again to show you what it looks like now. First the entire sheet:

You can see that the right flower is now finished. I've started to draw the buds on the left too. And they are also nearly done. The third is now work in progress and I hope, at the end of the week to start with the last flower. I'm not sure about the placement of the stems but there is nothing I can do about that now....

Cherry

This morning I saw a beautiful painting of some cherries a contact of mine (nas740) made in watercolour. This afternoon I had a bowl of cherries on my drawing table and thought I'd give it a go. Here is just one. But it was fun to do because the great dark deep colours and when the drawing was finished it was tasty too :))

Dark side

Come over to the dark side... of my garden that is. Thought I'd make a dark version of the garden photos too. It actually is rather fun to do :)

Thanks Heidi for your sweet words! I'm feeling much better because of them :*

Pastel Garden

I wasn't feeling that well this week. Actually, I'm not feeling well at all for the last ... months. I had some good periods but overall it has been a bit hard lately. So this week, again, I had a bad week and I was very tired. I wanted to draw, I did draw... but the drawing is not going that well if I'm not feeling okay. When I'm not able to draw I like to play a bit with Photoshop. I decided to make this mosaic. These are all small details from photos I made in my garden.