Seasons of Colour – April

Autumn Red – Watercolour pencils and ink

Here is my contribution for April.  The ornamental grape-vine that shades the my house from the hot north sun, is starting to turn.  It is not cold yet and only a few of the leaves turned bright red, the rest are more of a russet-brown.  We will need a frost to really get the colours to brighten up.

I like the way the grape-vine twines around itself and the grey trunk contrast with the bright red leaves,  I have tried to convey the texture of the rough trunk and the smooth leaves, the pattern around it almost give it a medieval feel and the tones are the quintessential autumn colours.  Not sure if it needs more work, but as these are supposed to be quick works and  have already spent half a day on it, I think I will leave it there.

I took a few photos of the sun shiny through the leaves and as one turned out quite well I will share it with you, just realise that I make no claims at being a photographer.  These are happy snaps with my iPad.

Karen

 

Budburst in Champagne

Here is a quick sketch I did of the champagne vines, they are just starting to put out their leaves and you could still clearly see the old twisted trunks.  The contract between the bright green of the new leaves and the grey, old trunks was lovely.

The vines here are much shorter than Australia, they would not have been more than 3-4 feet tall while ours are around 5 feet.  I think that these grapes when they grow up will become Moet-Chandon Champagne, such a fine future they have in front of them.  Years of resting and cosseting in the caves and then being sent off all around the world for people to drink in celebration of their life special moments.  I bought a bottle of vintage champagne from the Champagne house where we stayed to drink later in the year for my special moment, my 50th birthday.

I also managed to buy a couple of pens at my favourite Paris art shop, and one of them was a Japanese ink pen.  It has a brush on either end, one black and the other grey.  It is very lovely to draw with and I was happy with the lines it made.  I wish I could tell you the name of it, but it is all in Japanese.

Karen

 

Postcard 5 Grapevine Tendrils to German Winelover

Grapevine Tendrils

I thought that this postcard was going to be easy.  Some of these postcards have been completed in under an hour, from image searching to finished article.  The Coon Cat, which has been the favourite so far with readers and the one I feared the most was easy in the end.  This one took me ages.

• Topic The recipient Klaus in Germany was a food and wine lover, someone after my own heart.  I immediately had an idea for a postcard, I wanted to do a grapevine on a trellis.  When I went searching for an image, I couldn’t find one that would work for me, getting very frustrated as I  had seen the subject matter on plenty of wine bottle labels before, ( I admit to being familiar with plenty of wine bottles in my time), it wasn’t that unique.  In my surfing I did find a number of pictures of tendrils so I decided to do tendrils on the wire instead. I have often admired the tenacious tendrils they have a mind of their own and are amazingly strong.
• Technique  I wanted to show the difference in the materials I was drawing.  It was clear in my mind.  Black ink, cross hatched for the wire line.  Pale cream of the tendril and muted greens for the background, showing hints of the vine leaves.  The wire went well, the tendril took more time, but that background really tried to defeat me.  You would not believe how many layers of colour are in that background.  The first attempt had it too green and nothing stood out, so another four layers of colour and I had something close of my minds image.

Tendrils take 1

• Outcome Three hours of work, one hour of image hunting and it is still not as good as I had imagined it.  Sometimes I just have to let go.  I am happy with it, but would really like another go at it to see if I could get it better.  I think it needs to be a bit closer so I can get the detail in that i need.  As you can properly tell by now, I like cropped, closeup images.  I really enjoy getting close to everyday items and showing them to people as they might not have looked at them before.  That is what I see as one of the roles of art, to show people a different way of looking at the world, maybe they will then get more out of the world then they did before.

Well Klaus, I hope you like for postcard, it was made for you as an old world  , from me a new world wine lover.  Plenty of effort went into it and a couple of glasses of a very good Pinot Noir from the Mornington Peninsular.  Great wine region near Melbourne.

Salute!!