It's been a while since my last tutorial (3 years to be exact), so I'm very pleased to announce I finally finished the third one. The subject this time is painting storm clouds. As usual the video follows the painting process, from it's planning stages to the finished work. I'm adding the dry brush to the list of painting techniques. It's a very helpful tool for painting life like clouds.  I just posted a 6 min. trailer on YouTube and on my website. If you decide to purchase the video, please go to http://paintingskies.com/video/.   Before the Storm, oil ..read more

Wave Breaking on a Peer, oil on panel, 33.5 x 59" I'm in the middle of a wave-painting frenzy. Finished two wave paintings in the last month and I'm working on a third. Really enjoying myself. To me, a successful wave painting is about energy and freedom. Working on one always raises my mood. It's pure painting fun with all it's different surfaces: smooth, soft green patches where the wave is rolling over and explosions of white foam when it breaks. All these surfaces need a different approach: I glaze the smooth parts and for the foam I use pure paint, no medium at all.  ..read more

Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 I'm a Romantic. Not that I treat my wife to a candle lit dinner every week (she'd probably think I went mad), but I can relate to the ideas about nature of the Romantic era. It lasted from (give or take) 1800 to 1850. A true Romantic sees nature as a source of very intense and sometimes even religious experiences. The genre to best express that feeling is of course landscape. One of the most important Romantic landscape artists is the German Caspar David Friedrich. In some of his paintings he places a lonely pedestrian facing ..read more

Those of you who have seen my full length tutorials know that I often start with a midtone when I'm painting clouds. It can either become the shadow part or the bottom layer for the highlights. Then I slowly build up the highlights until I get them just right. With 'Tidal Pool' I took a different approach.   Tidal Pool, oil on panel, 35.4 x 47.2"    I started by painting the blue of the sky covering the entire surface. Waited a day til it was dry. Painted the midtone, a soft purple-like grey. Waited another day. So far so good. Normally I would've painted a rather thin ..read more

As some of you may know I paint on 6 mil. MDF board. I order them at Mus-paneel, a small Dutch company, specialized in preparing painting boards. They do an exellent job. Got some secret recipe to make the surface as smooth as ice. After doing their magic they ship the boards to my framer to have them cradled. The cradle is glued to the back of the board  Cradling is essential, especially for the larger boards. It provides stability and prevents curvature. But there is another reason. I use floaters as a standard frame and the cradle makes it possible for the painting to be s ..read more

A White Christmas is very rare in Holland. I don't even remember the last time, but the web doesn't forget, so I looked it up: the last time we had one was in 2010 and the one before that was way back in the twentieth century. We do have snow though, at least a few times every winter. Very inspiring for a landscape painter. There's a common misunderstanding about snow. I hate to break the news to you, but it's not white. It has a lot of different colors, ranging from yellowish to light shades of purple, depending on the circumstances, but not white. Snowy Polder, oil on panel, 7.1 ..read more

It's been quite a while since I last posted a clip on YouTube, it was January 2017 I believe. It's not that I don't enjoy making them, but painting comes first and I've been pretty busy this past year. Anyway, I did another one and you can watch it on YouTube. It's 'A Quick Guide to making Oil Sketches on Paper' of just over 6 minutes. Hope you enjoy it ..read more

I've had better weeks. Felt a little weak on Monday, had a sore throat on Tuesday and was sneezing my head off on Wednesday. Couldn't paint all week. On top of that I managed to loose half of the footage for a video I was editing. Like I said I've had better weeks. It once again made me realize how important painting is to me. So let's talk about a painting I did recently. Foam on the Beach, oils on panel, 27.6 x 47.2" Sometimes, when painting a film of water on a beach, I first do the beach, all the way up to the surf. In the early stages there's sand as far as the first breaker ..read more

I always try to make my paintings as realistic as possible, even thought the scenes I paint are often imagined. When you're aiming for a high degree of realism a few things are essential. Smooth transitions for example. Equally important is the way you handle your edges. (By the way: the painting below is not the same as the one in my previous entry. It's a much larger variation on the same theme.) Rain Clouds #2, oil on panel, 40 x 160 cm Anyway, a cloud almost never has sharp edges. I already mentioned it in both my tutorial videos: a cloud with sharp edges is going to look like i ..read more

Every now and then I get the chance to show my work in Belgium, one of our neighbor countries. Great people. They like (and sometimes buy) my work and that makes me very happy. But lately I'm getting the impression they got a thing with frames. More and more Belgian buyers like to purchase their paintings unframed. Gallery owners can't stress enough they have no objections if you drop off your work unframed. I'm not sure what the reason is, but I hope it doesn't spread. The purpose of a frame is not only aesthetic, it's for protection as well. The surface of my paintings consists of very thin ..read more