Wild thing

I finally found some time this week to make a (little bit) larger painting. It's only bigger in paper size, not in subject. This is a Grass Vetchling (almost sounds like some sort of bird). The Latin name is Lathyrus nissolia and its a rare and protected plant in the Netherlands. As you can see the flowers are very similar to other peas. The biggest difference is the foliage. It's a really grassy plant and it doesn't climb like most Lathyrus' do.

It's really thin and there's a lot of white left on the page, as you can see. It was difficult though. The stems are long and thin and I'm not very good at painting straight lines. So I took it really slow. I did manage to give all the lines a shadow part. And for the flowers I got the colour right. The pods were so nice to paint, that was really fun :)

Now I hear you all ask me "Where does this lovely vetchling grow???" Well, I'll tell you.... roadsides, grain fields, woodlands and dykes. Sunny, warm, more or less open places slightly moist, moderately fertile to fertile, slightly acid to often chalky, grassy soil. Plenty of places like that but it's a rare little beauty nonetheless :(

I wish I had this near my house so I could paint a bigger painting with a few sprigs, dancing together. But this must do for now. A lovely elegant wild thing.

Akebia and a fuzzy practice

My Akebia quinata drawing is still not finished but I'll give you a nice scan of how it looks now. Here it is:

It's so nice to work with graphite again. Now I'll tell you a little about my technique because some people think it is only a very light touch. It is a bit maybe but most important is to use many different kinds of pencils. I use very hard ones (4H) and very soft ones(6B) and some in between of course. One of the most important things is to keep a sharp pencil at all times. So when I draw I have the pencil in my right hand and my manual sharpener in my left. I'm sharpening all the time.
Like in my coloured pencil drawings I layer a lot. In this way I can controle the lights and darks. To make a very smooth looking finish I use a hard pencil or I use a blending stump depending on what effect is needed. Most used tool to get a perfect drawing is my kneadable eraser. I use it all the time, to lift graphite, to add texture, to clean the paper....
Ah, and if you want to make a drawing like this too, be sure to use very smooth paper. I used Bristol for this one but there are other papers that are a bit more creamy and also very smooth.

Now, enough about that... Yesterday I had a bit of time to make a fuzzy Stachys leaf.

It's not a great botanical but I wanted to try out a fuzzy looking texture with my coloured pencils. Last year, when I tried it, I totally failed. I think now it's looking better. Not as good as I had in mind, but it's progress.

This afternoon I want to try out a technique I have in my head to make white flowers with coloured pencils. I never tried this technique so I don't know if it will work at all. In my mind it works very well... now let's see if it works in reality ;)

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.

New stuff for my garden

In Eenrum I bought some plants. Thought I'd better write it down somewhere to remember myself what it is I bought. I always forget....

- Angelica Gigas (2x)

- Astrantia major "Blues Night"

- Pulmonaria "Blue Ensign"

- Phlox "Rosa Pastell"

- Agastache "Blue Fortune" (although I wanted "Black Adder")

- Digitalis Mertonensis

- Astrantia major ex. "Hadspen Blood"

- Geranium "Sandrine"







I also bought some seeds to throw around in the garden Atriplex hortensis "Red Plume" is probably the best of all. Okay.... let's play in the soil now :))

Sweet Violet

This tiny violet is flowering in my garden now. It's native to Europe and Asia but also introduced in America. It has a wonderful sweet scent and is therefore used in perfumes. It has a beautiful deep violet purple colour (which is always fun to paint). Painted on Fabriano smooth watercolour paper. 9 x 8 cm

That look...

I was drawing the last two days. I saw a photo last week on Flickr. One of my contacts uploaded a photo of a girl. It was taken in the 1930s or so. The only thing we know about this girl is her name, Ruth Akin. Her portrait was so impressive, it was on my mind all week and I just had to draw that face. There's something about that girl. Her pose, her mouth... but most of all her eyes. They tell a story and it could be a very big secret or a sad history... maybe she was just tired. I guess we'll never know. It was a challenge to draw her and I made three drawings of her. The final one was the best and I think I captured a bit of her mysterious look. I made her with black coloured pencil to get a very dramatic contrast, like the photo.
I must say that it was a lot of fun to do and maybe I'll do something like this again some day.

The other thing I did (today) is going to my nursery to sell some of my cards and to buy some plants for my garden. I bought Astrantia, Pulmonaria, Angelica Gigas and a few other beauties. After collecting all the plants I wanted, I went for a walk in the spring garden of the nursery. Many wonderful flowers already. Helleborus, Corydalis, Scilla and, the best of all, Fritillaria. Not the normal Frits but a very light, creamy yellow, 50 cm high beauty: Fritillaria raddeana. They were planted all over the garden and it looked so wonderful. The weather was cold and very wet but those flowers lightened up the entire garden.

Another sweet surprise was a flower I never saw before. Well, not in this colour anyway. It had a name tag beside it and it said: Dentaria heptaphyllos. I couldn't find a lot of Dentaria heptaphyllos on Google though. But I did find out that it's better known as Cardamine enneaphyllos (Drooping Bittercress for normal people).

It's on my wishlist, just like that Fritillaria (funny that they both have the same pretty yellow I can tolerate in my garden... well... it's not very yellow at all.... Ivory.... Cream.... Lovely). Aaaahhhh.... spring :))

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.