Spring is coming!

The very first sign of spring for me is when the Hazel (Corylus avellana) in my back garden starts to flower. The large yellow-green catkins dangling in the wind always make me smile. So fun that the male (the large greenish worms) and female (tiny red fluffy bits) catkins flower on the same twig.

I wanted to paint a larger twig than this but got a bit bored by the catkins. To be honest, I started to paint it very detailed but soon got lazy. And since I was doing it for fun I made a bit impressionistic catkins. At the end I put in some sharper details and shadows. I think I got away with it :P

Souvenir from Florence

Now that all paintings are finished for the SBA show in London (I framed them yesterday), I wanted to draw something small. And with pencil! After all this time working with the small brushes and watercolours I just had to do a pencil drawing. On my desk I found a small Cypress cone. I found it in Italy last year near the Villa del Trebbio in Tuscany. There were lots of Cypresses on that hill, many of them very old.

 

In a few hours I made this small drawing in my sketchbook. I love drawing pine cones and this one was nice too. I think it's because I can go really black in the shadows. I also love the shape of these cones. Anyway, here it is:

Cypress Cone, Graphite pencil 3,5 x 6 cm

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 ;)

Hips

I finally managed to finish something again. And it was about time too. For the first time I painted rose hips with my watercolours. I already did hips in graphite, coloured pencils and even with pen & ink. But never watercolour. The Botanical Artists forum on Facebook has a bunch of very active and motivating members and when one starts to paint apples, we all start to paint apples. When one mentions she wants to paint hips I too want to paint hips.... It's fun though, to see all the different approaches to the same subject.

For the first time. And it was nice work. I really enjoyed doing it. I chose the tiny hips of Rosa 'Francis E. Lester'. This rose blooms with many clouds of small flowers during the summer and gets an enormous amount of orange hips in Autumn.

This is on Lanaquarelle HP, paper size 4"x 6".

Caran d'Ache Luminance 6901

Today I bought 11 Caran d'Ache Luminance coloured pencils to test them. They are so expensive and I wanted to know if it's worth all the money. I bought really soft colours... almost whites, a light blue and a wonderful shade of Olive Brown. My favourites are Olive Brown 10% and Raw umber 10%. Very usable. I found them very easy to blend and they also mix well (blue and yellow actually make green, which isn't always the case). The leads are soft and give a nice smooth, rich colour. On the other hand, making a thin transparent layer was easy too which is good when you have to put on many layers. Downside is that you can't read well the silver colour numbers, but that's just a little thing (although it is a bit frustrating when you use many similar colours at the same time). I didn't test them in combination with my Faber-Castells or Prismacolors yet. But I'm really looking forward to it.On the Caran d'Ache website is a very nice colour-chart it's just a bit too small for me. I wish they had put the chart there that you can see in the photo here, at the start of this blog (click the photo to see it larger). I'll have to see how many colours are really different and usable in botanical art. €3,50 ($3.33 or £2.65) is really a lot of money to spend on one pencil. So that huge tin must be a really generous gift for Christmas or maybe I'll limit my wishlist to just a few more colours. I'm really curious about the greens and the black.....

I'm on Zazzle

You can now buy some nice things with my artwork on it at my Zazzle store. There's not much there yet but I promise to fill it up soon. So if you're looking for a nice gift or you need a really fancy apron, come on over and make me a rich woman ;)


Shop other personalized gifts from Zazzle.

Dotting

I've been so busy lately with a lot of things. Most of them had nothing to do with botanical painting, drawing or gardening. A bad thing, although the other things had to be done too. Last week we had a week off. We went on holiday, away from home and all the things that still need to be done here. We went to museums, slept a lot, visited my parents in law and I celebrated my birthday. All in all another busy week. But this was fun.

I actually found some time to draw a bit again. It had been ages since I made my last pen and ink botanical and I really felt like doing one now. Another artist, Michael Murillo from the US, asked me if I would like to trade drawings. I saw a nude sketch he made and I was impressed. I really loved it. He wanted to give me that sketch and trade it for one of mine. I don't have a lot of sketches. At least I don't think they are worth a trade. So I thought this pen drawing could be nice for him if he liked it. He did. So I started dotting this amazing deep purple violet Clematis viticella 'Black Prince' from my mother's garden. It was so much fun and so relaxing to do. Yesterday I finished it and here's the result. I think I might stipple another drawing soon.