Silhouettes of Africa

The shadows now so long do grow,
That brambles like tall cedars show,
Molehills seem mountains, and the ant Appears a monstrous elephant.
(Evening Quatrains) - Charles Cotton

A daily practice of sketching and painting gives you a chance to exercise the big three P's - practice, practice, practice!

Watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm - 12" x 8"

Elephants in the shadow of a mountain on their way to water in the northern parts of the Kalahari desert (South Africa). This started off as a landscape, but I suddenly envisaged desert dunes and added the elephants.

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First Light

early dawn | two-note, two note | who are you?
A Twitter poem from WATERMARK


"First Light" - Acrylic on Canvas board - Maree©

This was one of my first ventures into Acrylics. I've only done another 2 or 3 since then, and will get around to posting them some time or another.

Sunrise or sunset in the Kalahari Desert in the Cape Province of South Africa is always a spectacular affair. Here I have tried to capture the mystery of the desert as the sun rises over a landscape of golden grass and small red dunes.

The name Kalahari is derived from the Tswana word Kgala, meaning "the great thirst", or Khalagari, Kgalagadi or Kalagare, meaning "a waterless place". The Kalahari desert is part of the huge sand basin that extends some 900 000 square kilometers from the Orange River up to Angola, in the west to Namibia and in the east to Zimbabwe. The sand masses were created by the erosion of soft stone formations. The wind shaped the sand ridges, which are so typical of the landscape in the Kalahari.

In the southern Kalahari desert, which is the driest part, the Kalahari desert takes the form of a stationary dune veld. To the East and to the North of this, the Kalahari desert becomes a flat park-like terrain or savannah.

The Kalahari is not a true desert as it receives too much rain, but is actually a fossil desert.