Stairs in garden on 22 November 2018

Yesterday evening 22 of November 2018 it was a theme evening at Aquarelmere.nl, and the theme was Stairs in the garden. We always meet on Thursdays. It was Ina that had suggested this theme. We have a planning of the theme evenings at Aquarelmere for the whole season. I am not blogging so much about Aquarelmere, and that is not fair because it is an excellent club of enthusiastic amateur artists. It is just that I get there late in the evening and I go home later and I bike to the meetings so there is no sparetime for blogging and later I forget about it. Tonight I thought that I created such a nice painting to blog about so that is what I do the day after.

We do one theme evening, and then the week after that there is a no-theme evening. Then it is rotating like that over the season.

Last night the theme was stairs in the garden. I found a reference photo that I liked and then I painted from what I could see on my mobile phone. I tried to make it as impressionistic as possible. Greens come in lots of variations, so it was a question of making green alterations. I made many brushstrokes with almost dry brush, scratching the paper with the side of the brush. The bumps gets painted, and the grooves are left white. Then I came back with a new layer doing similar strokes but with a difference in angle. Sometimes I exaggerated the white parts by filling in sections in between what already had become white during the scratching.

We had a long tea break were we talked about all sorts of things. Emmy had been on a long holiday so she had a lot of thing to tell about. I was okay with a long break because I had the feeling I was almost finished. Other times I have a tight shema but tonight I was almost finished at the time of the tea break. The artists tonight were Hilde, Hetty, Martine, Rita, Emmy, Ina, myself, Petra and Jelena. That is correct, I am the only man in this group. I think only Hanneke and Ineke was missing this evening.

At 10:00 we end the painting and then we have a chat about each others work and then we go home.