View on Koper (Slovenia)

My son Martijn likes to travel the world. He does not need much of an excuse to pack his bag and leave for a short trip to visit a place he has not seen before. This scene is from a journey he made a few years ago, mosty using trains for transport. He visited several countries in the eastern parts of Europe and made lots of photographs for his own memory and he always kindly allows me to use these landscape photographs as reference for my watercolours and other artwork.

This time I was inspired by a view on Koper in Slovenia. There are not so many buildings visible in this scene but the mountains in the background make this an inspiring view. The church tower is a nice landmark here and I decided that this had to be my 'point of interest' - if possible. I have not been simplifying the view of the roofs and houses much, I guess my son had a high standing point when he made the photographs I used. 
These buildings are built in a way that is not common in The Netherlands, so I had to concentrate well while painting them. Shadows, angles, roofs or streets are not what I am used to see in daily life so I cannot rely on my memory and have to work with my sketch - with lots of notes written on it - close by.

I have been painting this in two steps, the first step was wet-in-wet for the sky, the mountains and the 'details' in the background area, and the second step was wet-on-dry for the buildings, the trees between the buildings and the details. 
Usually I paint the whole painting wet-in-wet first with details wet-on-dry and that works very well for most landscapes. This little town asked for another approach and I am pleased with the result.

More information can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

Mushrooms again - trying out a new watercolour paper.

The last few days I have been free from my job, so after all the household chores were finished I wanted to paint. For these occasions I have an album with lots of mushroom pictures made by my husband or my daughter during autumnal walks. I just have to select one, think about how I want to paint this and get started.
Last year I bought a small block with Canson Montval paper, because of the convenient small size, ideal to bring with me on vacations. I did not need it last vacation so I decided to try the paper now. This time I used a reference made by my husband Peter.

The first - dark - painting is made in my usual manner: soaking and stretching my paper and then painting with a lot of water. The paper did not take that very well so I put a note on the block reminding me not to soak the paper before using it. After soaking it looked like the paper was pilling and I am not used to that.
I have tried to paint the background first and that too was a challenge, but after several stages of adding colour, washing with water, spreading out the colour and repeating where possible the background may be overworked, but it could be worse. Then I added the colours of the mushrooms and used a wooden pricker to draw the lines on the hoods of the mushrooms. 

The second painting was made on dry paper that had not been soaked and stretched. I started with the mushrooms and added the background colours later. having learned from the first painting, I did not try to make a dark, dramatic background but just added some colour variations by changing the mixture of blue, yellow and some Burnt Sienna that gives the green of the mosses under the mushrooms. And even here I had to be careful not to use too much water. For extra texture I splattered over the green mosses with the mixture I used for the mushrooms.
To make the mushrooms stand out I used Calligraphy Ink for some of the outlines and the lines on the hoods.

I have learned a lot about this watercolour paper - at least what I can not do with it and I will use it again of course, probably with the wash-and-ink technique or watercolour pencils.

More information about these paintings can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

A path in the Forest of Anlier - a charcoal drawing

 

The history of the Forest of Anlier is long. It is said that Julius Caesar wrote about this forest in his travel reports. The landscape is full of variations, from hillsides with fields through valleys with side rivers of the Sûre and forests with either trees that show the greatest autumn colours or conifers that stay thick and green all the year long.

This path is between such areas with conifers and there was little light when we walked here. The path is muddy, the sides are overgrown with mosses and behind the first or second line of trees there is only a grey shadowed area where the ground is covered with fallen branches. This area was planted for the production of nice straight trees that could be used in the industry. As the trees stand so close together only the top branches are green. Behind the curves in the path there is another area, where more daylight can reach the forest ground.

My husband Peter made several pictures of these muddy, dark paths and I chose this one for a charcoal drawing.  

More information about this drawing can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com 

The river basin of the Sûre - after the beavers moved in!

Now I am back to the vacation memories of last October.  We made a long walk through the Forest of Anlier and the views inspired my husband and me to make lots of photographs. I have been making several paintings yet and this is the next in that line. 
After we had been walking over the hills and descended into the forest area we found traces of beaver activities. First we saw the trees that were gnawed at and had fallen down, later we had to leave the path because it was flooded. We could continue our walk easily because we only had to step a little higher on the hillside to pass by the flooded area. 
This scene is where the small brook was flooded and some of the trees were 'with their feet in the water'. This brook is part of the river basin of the river Sûre and we could not find a name for it on the maps. We were still close to Fauvillers at this point of our walk.

The scene was quite a challenge as the water was standing still, but there was not much light to be reflected. The colour of the water is really muddy here and only the trees standing in the water have a bit of reflection. In the middle of the water is a row of stones that might have been the river bank but now is surrounded by the muddy water.
The day we were walking there the sky was not clear because of pollution from forest fires in Portugal brought here by the wind. We did not see much of it, more to the west the sky was yellow that day. I think we had a much lighter version of that - in some of our photographs the discolouration of the sky can be seen.

In the reference picture I used (made by my husband Peter) for this painting the water was not 'standing out' very well, still I have tried to make the most of it. This was the best picture of that watery scene we could make and even though I am not completely happy with the result, my husband tells me the painting shows the atmosphere of that scene very well.  
I have made some finishing touches with the Iridescent Medium my daughter gave me, hoping that it would give some sparkle to the water and some of the leaves in the foreground. Maybe I was too careful or the medium simply does not reflect enough light for my camera to see the effect in the picture. More experiments will have to follow.

More information about this watercolour painting (paper and paints used, size, availability, etc) can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com