Pittoresque

A pastel drawing of Estate ‘Reigersbergen’ adjacent to the Haagse Bos in quite some impressionistic moves. You can see me walk there very often because I live close by. Because of my artistic activities and my need to keep up my condition I take 10.000 steps per day. Consequently this leads me to this area automatically because all other directions lead to concrete buildings and flats only. The estate forms a link between The Haagse Bos and Estate ‘Marlot’. It is an intimate and small area in spite of the arrival of the Louwman Museum. Somehow it has kept its variety of different landscapes: meadows, treelines, woods and narrow paths. Plenty of artistic motifs to spot everything I walk over there and I havent discovered all of its beauty yet.

Lots of Colors

The sun sometimes sets the trees on fire so it seems. I like the appearance of the sunlight deforming treescapes and rendering leafs to yellow and orange hues. Such is caused by a strong razor backlighting. It shows that no object has a static color under all circumstances. In fact’, you can see all colors in all objects dependant on the lighting. So I put this principle intro practise in this pastel. Putting this one to paper I stronly thought of impressionists like Monet, telling there are lots of colours to be found in shadows.

Next Pastel

The location of the prominent tree as seen in this pastel drawing is not far from the spot where I made the second drawing. That one I made in early Spring whereas this one in Summer. Now I come to think of it, Autumn and Winter are lacking. Better make some more.

Epilogue

In 2021 I was making this pastel drawing available as a printable. When I took it out of the storage folder I was not satisfied with the lighting. In particular the lighter tones high up in the tree I found too whitish in relation to the sun setting. I added some purples high up in the tree just as you expect them appear at that time of day. The area directly around the tree I made darker and I enhanced the color saturation of the blue hues. Consequently the dramatic effect of the light shimmering through the tree branches is more convincing now. After all, the tree was not the main reason for the pastel but the light that shone through it.

Pastel drawing on Canson Mi-Teintes Touch paper (47 x 62 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers

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