A family affair

My eldest daughter, Anneli, is really good with drawing people.  You can see some of her artwork on her Pinterest board.  This morning we had some time at hand and I came across the idea of doing a joint painting/sketch.  I have seen joint paintings before where Joseph Zbukvic, Alvaro Castagnet and Herman Pekel were jointly working on a painting.  The link is here.  So, we decided to give it a try.  We found some colourful images of people and a good mountain  picture on Pinterest and started to combine them into a painting.  I would be doing the mountain and sky and she would be doing the detail of the grass and the people… I am not good with detail.  We worked on a 190 gsm A2 sheet.  I used large flat brushes with Windsor and Newton Cotman watercolours and she used a number 1 brush with the watercolour and some Derwent Academy Watercolour Pencils.  The result can be seen below.  I really like it. It feels like the people and the valley just gel!  I can see myself staring down that valley to wonder what is down there and hear the wind softly blowing around me.

One of my favourite art teachers, Richard Robinson, once made the following comment: “… One of my favorite moments is sitting back with a coffee and absorbing a freshly finished painting – seeing how my passion translated itself into paint. If the translation is garbled their is inevitably disappointment, but if the translation is true the coffee seems to taste extra good.”  …. and I must say, BOY, DID THAT COFFEE TASTE GOOD!!!!!

The valley

Johannesburg Botanical Garden

I while back my wife and I went for a date and spent the time in Johannesburg Botanical Garden at Emmarentia Dam.  The sun shining through the trees was quite spectacular and I took the picture below as a reference for a future painting.

Johannesburg Botanical Garden

I came across this photo a couple of days ago and decided to start to work on it.  As a starting point I did the following watercolour sketch.  I was trying to work with general shapes and colour.  The outcome was OK, but not what I expected, so I decided to move on to some acrylics.

Watercolour study

I have not worked in acrylics for quite a while, but I was really satisfied with the outcome.  I just realized again that the depth of colour one can achieve with acrylics is some much better that what can be achieved with watercolour.  Watercolours has its placed and I am thing to primarily use the watercolours as a medium for sketching and to perform a pre-study for a painting.

Emmarentia dam forest in acrylics

Some more Urban Sketching

I am a member of the Joburg Sketchers Urban Sketching group and we recently had two outings in one week.  The first was in Melville where I had the opportunity to sketch some buildings – something I quite fancy.  We just managed to complete the basic sketches before the rain struck, but I added some touches later on to get to the finished version presented below.

Melville corner

A couple of days later we headed to the Rosebank Art Market where I came across a toy shop selling wooden toys.  I just could not resist!

Rosebank Art Market Toy Store

Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens

A while back we had a pick-nick with some friends in the Walter Sisulu Botacial Gardens.  I took my painting equipment with, but soon realized that I was not going to accomplish something with all the kids running around.  So I decided to take some photos and then base a sketch on the collection of the photos.  I am traditionally not very good with drawing and painting people, so this all turned out to be quite an experiment.  I decided to simplify the figures as much as possible and the outcome was rather acceptable.

Walter Sisulu Pick-nick