More Treasures

I'm still busy painting my small finds for the 30 days challenge on Facebook. The results are here but the photos are not that good. Most of them taken with my iPhone. But it's just to share it and give you an idea. Also I would like to add that not all thingies are that well painted. I hate painting leaves and the one leaf I did of the Amelanchier lamarckii turned out a bit poorly. So let's start with that one:

The next one I painted was much better and also more fun. It's the seed pods of Iris sibirica. I paint them almost every year because they are never boring.

The one I painted after that was the most fun so far. The seed of a Lime tree or Linden, if you prefer that. Tilia x europaea seeds with a small leaf. It went surprisingly fast and turned out so nice. I'm really happy with this one.

Yesterday I painted a small sprig of flowers of Clematis vitalba. Again, this is a terrible photo but it's the best I could do with my iPhone. Perhaps later I'll try to take a better picture of it.

And today I painted a teeny-tiny Hydrangea flower of my Preziosa. Again, it's one of those subjects I paint every year because I never get tired of them. Actually I'm painting an entire sheet full of those flowers. Each year I take out that sheet and add a few more flowers.

There will be more to come....

Akebia and others....

It has been too long since I've posted something here. But.... I've been busy. I went on a botanical painting course of five days in Leiden. My tutor was Anne Marie Evans and I learnt a lot that week. We painted tulips. I guess tutors from abroad want to see tulips when they come to Holland. Last year, Valerie Oxley started her course with (yellow) tulips. I just hope this is not becoming a trend. I like tulips, don't get me wrong, I like them in a garden or a vase. Not to paint them. But I think I'm repeating myself, I told you all this before, didn't I?

Anyway.... I painted a botanical tulip, Tulipa turkestanica. It didn't make things easier for me (this one had five flowers instead of one and was almost white) but it looked far more interesting that most of the other tulips. Well it did for me, don't know about the other students ;) Here's what the painting looked like at the end of the course:

It's not finished yet, it needs roots and more details but you get the idea. It looks a bit old-fashioned, like it's from the 18th century, like Redouté or something. Very different to what I'm used to.

After the course I painted in "De Keukenhof" for a day with some other painters of the Dutch Society of Botanical Artists. We sat in the Orchid pavilion, surrounded by hundreds of tourists from all over the globe, stuck or not stuck in the Netherlands by the Icelandic vulcano ashes.
So I painted my first ever orchid flower. Many botanical artists paint orchids. I didn't and I don't think I'll paint those cultivated orchids again. I just don't like them. I like the wild ones that grow here in the Netherlands but they don't look at all like the ones shown in the pavilion in Lisse.

The week after I had to go to the opening of the Siebold exhibition in the Siebold House in Leiden. A wonderful exhibition with wonderful paintings made by the Dutch Society of Botanical Artists. My Hydrangea drawing is exhibited there too. Also a lot of old herbaria and floriligia are shown. Really nice to see the old things from the Siebold period next to the modern works of art.

I made this in Photoshop to show you the difference between the periods. The old painting was made by a Japanese painter and the Hydrangea on the left is a dried specimen that Siebold brought to Europe. It's a different variety than the one that I painted but I don't think he would have minded that :P

Now I'm back home and I decided to start a pencil drawing. It has been too long since I made my last graphite pencil botanical. It's of Akebia quinata, also a Siebold introduction. It has been on my wishlist for some years and it's flowering now in my front yard. I love this climber. The leaves are very interesting, the flowers are maybe even more interesting. But the colour of the flower is wonderful..... but I decided to do a graphite drawing anyway :D Maybe I'll make a coloured thing some other year. Now I just had to do a pencil drawing. So this is a WIP. I'll post it again when it's finished.

Update!

Ok, I know, I'm a bad blogger, sorry for that. But to make it up here's an update. I was so busy these last few weeks to get my Hydrangea finished in time. And guess what... it's FINISHED!!!!! Yay for me :) I sent it to the National Herbarium this week and it went straight to the photographer from there. It will be photographed for the flyer and catalogue or something. Anyway, I managed to scan the big drawing (in 4 parts) and after merging the scans together, here's the result of all the hard labour:

I was so relieved when the drawing was gone I just had to do something fun and easy. So I bought a very nice red apple. Yesterday I sat down and in one afternoon (ok, and part of the evening) I finished the "Braeburn Apple" with coloured pencils. It was so good to do something with a simple shape and such rich, deep colours.

Don't know what I'll do now. Maybe I'll add one or two apples to that first one. It seems a bit lonely on the paper. And doing it was great fun, really....
On the other hand I'd love to do something with my watercolours again too. But whatever it will be, it's going to be small and 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....

Update

I'm still working on my Hydrangea drawing for the von Siebold project. It is so difficult. Really hard. I made some flowers first. Hard!!!

Then I thought it would be good to add some leaves. Harder!!!! And last weekend I was at the point where I had to make a big decision about the composition by placing a third flowerhead in the drawing. Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh!!!!!

And it's not over yet... I have to do a lot of work still on all three flowerheads, I need to add even more leaves and the stems of course....
I've had some fights with this drawing, it has been the most difficult drawing I ever made.

I'm sure there will be more fights (and some more tears to go with it too I suppose) over the next couple of weeks. But I'm happy to say that I'm finally getting the feeling it might be a nice piece when I'll be finished.

Von Siebold Project

At the moment I'm working hard on a drawing for the Von Siebold Exhibition which will be held in Het Von Sieboldhuis in Leiden. It's an exhibition about the plants Von Siebold brought from Japan to Europe. Drawings from that era will hang next to botanical drawings made by artists from the Dutch Society of Botanical Artists. During this exhibition there will also be a special walk around the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden where a lot of his plants were planted when Von Siebold returned to Europe.

The artists from the society got a long list of plants in the Hortus. We all could pick one or two plants to draw. I picked the Hydrangea. It's a shrub I think I would never draw for fun. Too much flowers I guess. But this is a nice oppertunity to try something different. So I thought...

This Hydrangea is so difficult and it's a huge struggle. The sketching was easy and fast. I drew 3 twigs with flowers. The next stage was to make a good composition on the paper. The size of the image is the same for all artists (about 32 x 40 cm).

I tried out a little flower first to choose the right colours. That was ok. Now I'm working on my first big flowerhead on the bottom left. It is more blue than the little practice flower I did before. And after a few flowers the colours looked too dirty for me.

Now I'm trying a different approach: colours first, shadows later. I hope it will work.
Sorry for the bad pictures, I can't scan this and have to use my little camera and Photoshop. I will scan the end result though :)

If it will finish and not end up in the dustbin.

Foot

Last week I started to draw in my new sketchbook. After some weeks of pain in my wrist, I am very happy to say, the pain is almost gone. Of course I can't do everything yet, and some sudden moves still hurt but, most of the time, the wrist is painless. I still can't bend it very well though and that's the reason why I'm not touching my coloured pencils just yet.
This week however, I did my first drawings with graphite pencils. First I made a drawing of Bertus. I made it from a photo. Normally I don't work from photos but Bertus just can't keep still (and I really doubt if he ever will). It is Bertus playing on the beach of Schiermonnikoog last summer. His first time he saw the beach and the sea.

The next drawing I made was a botanical one. Small, but nice. It is a branch from the Climbing Hydrangea next too our front door. It really isn't big....

And yesterday evening I decided to draw my foot. On Flickr there are a lot of people now uploading self portraits. Very nice.... but I am just so scared of drawing my face. I know it will frustrate me enormously. It will drive me absolutely mad.... So this is my self portrait. My foot. And so I started to draw my right foot. I had never made a drawing of my foot before and frankly I thought it would end up in the dust bin. But it didn't. It actually went really well. And after sketching my foot I sketched my ankle, also good enough.... So I sketched some more, calf, knee, thighs... stop... hold on.... Thighs????? Oops, that was a lot of foot!!!!! I just didn't know where to stop. Lucky for me and the rest of the world, the paper stopped before I could. So the thighs is the end of the foot drawing.
Anyway.... I am pretty pleased with this first drawing of my "foot" ;-)

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Tiny stuff

I have a ganglion in my right wrist. That's my drawing wrist. Normally a ganglion isn't very painful but in my wrist it is painful. Especially when I have been drawing for a while. So 1,5 years ago I went to my doctor to ask what it was and what he could do about it. He told me what it was and that I could get rid of it by hitting it against the wall or give it a big whack with a phonebook or a bible (in case I had a lot of faith in God's power). But he also said that it wouldn't be a guaranty that it would be gone for good.
My doctor is a very nice man with a great sense of humour. He knows that I draw botanical stuff and he likes my drawings. He therefore thought it would be wise to send me to a plastic surgeon in the hospital in Groningen.

The plastic surgeon (strange name isn't it?) had a look at it and told me it was unusual that it's hurting me so much. So, just to be sure, he told me to get an x-ray. There was nothing on the x-ray. So he told me to get a PET-scan. There was nothing on the PET-scan either. But still he didn’t want to cut the ganglion out of my wrist. He inserted a needle inside my ganglion and removed the glue like substance instead. He hoped it would stay away.
But a month later the ganglion was there again and still painful. So…. I returned to the surgeon. Now he wanted to see an MRI of my wrist.

Sighhhhh……

Ok, so two weeks ago I went to the hospital again to get that MRI. And last week I went to see my surgeon again. He told me that the real problem isn’t in the same spot where the ganglion lump is. But it is more inside my wrist. In the joint of my thumb. Now I have to get a surgery to get it all out. And for that he has to cut around some bones and tendons. He has to cut some tendons too.
The surgery will take place around Christmas time. Yippee! And after that I won’t be able to use my wrist for about 6 weeks.

BUT….. after that I will be able to draw again without pain. At last…..

And until then I only can draw some really tiny stuff. And that’s what I’ve been doing the last weeks. I can show you these two drawings.

One of Clematis seeds (although there are some people who rather think of it as sperm, and others look at it and think of tadpoles). They are the seeds of Clematis viticella “Little Nell” also blogged HERE.
The other little tiny thingy is the small drawing of a Hydrangea “flower” you can see at the start of this post. I want to do some more of those…. They are really very much fun to do.