Guest Artist - Joan Knoesen (2)

Joan Knoesen - Wuppertal 

I am back home and will now have a chance to digitally document my grandmother's art - I hope...

There is a story behind this painting - like all paintings I guess, so I'll endeavour to find out the details and share it with you all.

This is a painting of Wuppertal, a small town 72km southeast of Clanwilliam and about 250km from Cape Town. The little shop on the left hand side is where they manufacture and sell veldskoene. A veldskoen is a basic leather shoe - directly translated as 'field shoe'.

Red Eyed Tree Frog - 5 -

Red Eyed Tree Frog - 5 - Part 8

"Consummatum est"

I'm not doing anymore on <-- this frog. At some point one has to declare, "IT IS FINISHED!" And in comparison to the other frog paintings already declared consummatum est - this one joins them... All these tree frog paintings you see here are on 100cm by 80cm stretched canvas.

I'm taking a well deserved break from frogs for the time being (even though my focus remains on completing my series...) but I am keen to get back to doing a few more watercolour landscapes.
Watch this space...



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Red Eyed Tree Frog 3 - Part 2

Red Eyed Tree Frog  - acrylic painting process

This tree frog IS proving to be a little challenge.
I've found I have to be very careful with my observations.
In this 'episode' of my painting's development I painted a few layers of light green in a water colour-type wash.
Whilst that was still wet, I brushed some viridian hue where the shadow was intended to be...
I then used blue lake to define the black bits and went to give more green into the leaf by using a mix of phthalo blue and medium yellow.
Having put a little too much blue on the tray, I used it up by layering the previous black bits and shadows. Standing back and looking at the overall pic I decided to bring some more yellow ochre to the background - using a flick or few of leftover green into the mix as well.
After that, I used a thicker wash of medium yellow to define the thick veins of the leaf.
And that's where we are up to... The red eyes of the tree frog are very tempting but I'm saving that for another time.
If I'm not back before the new year - have a great festive season...

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Creating a Body of Work and other such stuff

Filling in time on the weekend I looked for sites that might be useful to me in my latest art endeavours.
Came across THIS one which I found useful...
The title is: Develop a painting style and create a body of work for a gallery.
I think finding my painting style is going to be a little difficult without a body of work... The body of work I have at the moment amounts to a hodgepodge of different paintings in different media - watercolours and acrylic with nothing resembling anything like some of the requirements I've read in various articles. Art is meant to be fun and so it shall continue to be for me...
Notwithstanding that, I do realise the importance of sticking to a definite theme.
So the two themes I have decided to concentrate on will be my favourite red eyed tree frogs and Argave plants. By doing heaps of paintings on these alone, I hope to show my 'expertise' here...
Three canvases have already been primed - ready to experiment and have fun.

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watercolour painting of my Art Tools

This weeks theme was a still life of some of my art tools.

Drawing skills are a little off - the pot looks lopsided but the painting still took me half an hour to complete.




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On the road to Culverden

This was a picture I always wanted to capture - a clump of trees on the dry hills of the Hurinui district NZ.

It was looking rather washed out so I used guash to paint over it in places - done quickly and in frustration, but then I think it works...

Culverden, Hurinui district

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Storm Approaching - watercolour

Capturing the stormy skies of Kaikoura NZ, I took artistic licence in painting the 'cliffs'.

Scraping the wet colour with the edge of a credit card gave definition which quite surprised me.




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Hoar Frost - watercolour

It always amazes me how some of the fastest painted pictures produce some interesting results.
Again, I used the credit card to scrape paint off the paper - for the house roof - bottom left, the definition of branches in the trees and the ground to the bottom right.
Have tried to recreate this painting on a larger scale, but those attempts have been cut up for bookmarks...




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Seascape

Another fast painting that surprised me...
Running white guash through the wet sea produced an interesting foam to the waves.




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Watercolour - whale at Kaikoura

This was done a few years ago from a postcard.

I touched it up last week by darkening the sky at the top.

Limiting the colours I used was a fun experiment.


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Bowl of Apples - Watercolour

This I 'cropped' since the rest of the picture didn't work for me - it was a bowl of apples on a chair...
Painting over the apples with a blob of red made them stand out rather than looking washed out.
Putting the brown paint at the base of the fruit and around the bowl rim (to me), gives it grounding.





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