Sketches

Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Vaesrade in bamboo pen and ink

 

This afternoon, drinig with my bicycle through the hills near our house. Quick ink sketch (with reed pen) and some watercolour on Canson aquarel paper.

Thursday, 18 September 2025

Cadillac Fleetwood 1952

 

Went to a vintage car meeting in Heerlen (Cruise-in). I have drawn on these occasions before, always nice to see real old cars. This was a beautiful CadillacFleetwood 1952, a huge car, but beautifully restored. 

Wednesday, 17 September 2025

AI images (4). The wing.

 

Next installment of my AI game. I used the Nike of Samothrace drawing (with colours) to generate a prompt. As stated in the last post, it resulted in different images. I liked the interior one the best, but as you can see the statue was gone. I replaced it for a single wing (representing the Nike statue), and added some smoke. See above drawing, made with a pilot Parrellel pen with non-waterproof ink. 

Then I put it in the generator again, which led to horrible results. All very soft, girly like, fake watercolour images of pigeons flying in clouds of flowers, in pink, red, yellow and green. Yuck. 

So I had to tweak the prompts a bit  to get my wing and ruined buildings back again. And I grew tired of all the red, so I guided the generator towards grey and sepia. The result (through GPT-4o and GPT image) is shown below (bottom right). I will use that one to make a new drawing. It's time for the wing to leave the building.

AI images experiment (3)

 

As you can see I gave the ink drawing of the last AI experiment installment some shades. (done with a pentel Parrallel pen which has non-permanent red ink). Now I put this through the reversed prompting program, which translates the image into a text (which you can reuse again to generate new images). Interesting enough, different text machines deliver totally different images, of which the focus is different. Sometimes drawing style, sometimes colour, sometimes subject. The last one (Florence) even specified a red bird, which the picture didn't even show. Pictures all made by Stable Diffusion 3.0. It clearly shows how you need to work your prompting to get the results you want.

The images: top left: original drawing; right: Joycaption; second row left: GPT4o-mini; right: Florence.

Monday, 15 September 2025

1/2 marathon 2025

 

Ran a half marathon yesterday. In Heerlen, the Obvion run. Finished at 1 hour 58 minutes as number 304 out of 450 runners. The weather was perfect: 14 degrees, sunny and a little wind. 

I am rather proud of myself, not so bad for a 67 year old guy.

Friday, 12 September 2025

Terstraten (Nuth)

A sketch I made on a nice warm afternoon, in a small Hamlet called Terstraten, a few kilometers from my house. Already zome weeks ago, but had no time to post this earlier.

Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Vosges: Fraize market

 


During the painting week we made quick sketches on the market of Fraise. Forecast was rain, so we visited the place and took the sketches home to the B&B, as inspiration of the paintings we made there. In fact, it remained dry, so in the end we were able to paint in the garden. But on a lesser note: the paintings were horrible. I am not going to post those here.

Monday, 8 September 2025

Vosges Clefcy (2)


Two paintings I made in the painting week in France, based on the leaves and trees in the garden. The top one is a birch tree, made on board, tile mortar and acrylic paint, size 40x50. It looks better in reality. The second one is also acrylic on board 40x50, but with glued on paper to get some texture.
 

Tuesday, 2 September 2025

Vosges: Clefcy Ptit monde (1)

Last week I attended to a painting week in France, in the Vosges region. We did 5 days of painting with a lovely group, under the guidance of the gifted artist Annemiek Jongen. We stayed at a B&B in Clefcy called Ptit Monde, they were very hospitable and served great food.


 

Not all works were great. This is a view to a house in Plainfaing, paintedon location. It was supposed to be in the style of the Dutch impressionist Isaac Israels, I am not sure about that, but it was a great exercise.