While scrolling through past photos, I came across some reminders of two paintings I did last year that stretched me in new ways and brought me so much joy! These were two commissioned home portraits that I did for a friend. I painted from photos that she sent me, and it was such a pleasure to work with her on these projects. The first painting was of her family's lake cabin. Here is the photo she sent me, shared with her family's permission:
Something I was looking forward to tackling was all of those tree shadows, especially the ones in the grass. It's a pretty dominant part of the photo, other than the house itself. I also liked the pop of bright red from the planter on the deck, which is a beautiful little contrast with all of the gray/blue and green in the picture. After communicating with my client, we agreed to leave out the planter on the lower level behind the deck pole, as well as the covered grill on the top deck. The lower planter is mostly obscured and not essential to the painting, and the grill appeared as a rather undefined shape that blocked the view of the left hand window. With these agreements in place, it was time to begin working!
My first step was to create the outline sketch of the home, and transfer that to watercolor paper. When I am working for a client, I always submit photos of this step to them for approval before moving on to the painting stage.
Here I am using 300lb Arches cold pressed paper*, which is extra thick and heavy. I usually use this paper for commissioned paintings, because it rarely buckles and warps, and it can hold a ton of water. It's more expensive, but the results I get from it are great every time.
I always get just a little bit jittery at this point, knowing that I'm about to put paint to paper. I have to remind myself that it's ONLY a piece of paper, and that if I make a mistake that I can't fix, I can always start over! One way I get over these first-stage-jitters is to look around the reference photo for areas that I need to figure out how to paint, and also to begin sorting out which colors/paints I want to use. For this painting, I created little samples of each different area that I would have to paint, and did a small practice swatch of each one to get a feeling for how I wanted to paint it.
Below, you can see my painting setup along with a color swatching sheet I made in the top right of the picture. This helped me to work out not only what colors to use, but also what strength/dilution of paint to water I wanted, to get the tonal values right.
I submitted all these preliminary swatches and tests to my client, to make sure she felt good about my paint choices as well. Then I began, as I always do, by painting the sky. It's hard to even see the sky in the photograph but it is there, a light blue behind all of the trees. Even if it's barely visible, you must lay down some sort of sky color first - you cannot leave the paper white or it will just look like you missed it. And you cannot plan to paint the sky over the top of the leaves later, because chances are you might reactivate the dried paint and smudge the leaves as you go. So the sky went in first, and then I began the surrounding foliage, working from back to front and painting carefully around the edges of the house. I painted the tree foliage onto dry paper so that I could get the tiny defined shapes of leaves at the edges. For the grass, I painted onto wet paper so that the light and dark green paints would bleed and bloom into each other, creating feathery grass texture (so much easier than trying to paint individual blades of grass!).
Also, notice in the photo above how I outlined the shape of the large tree trunk on the left side of the house by the steps, and also some of the larger branches, but I did not draw out all of the smaller branches. I prefer to leave that part until the painting stage, because then I can add the branches a bit more naturally and spontaneously, rather than trying to fill in a web of tiny pencil outlines - which can end up looking stilted and contrived.
Above, you can see how I painted the foliage on the main tree. I painted it onto dry paper with lots of little brush strokes and dabs. I love the Princeton Neptune brushes* for this job because they are softer brushes (made of synthetic squirrel hair), and so the marks they make are rounder and less pointy.
And finally I worked on the house, starting with a general blue-gray wash over the whole thing, and adding more and more detail over the top as it dried. Here's the finished painting:
I also did a second one for this same client, which was a portrait of her sister's home. I do not have permission to share the actual photo of the house, but here is my finished painting of it, with the family dogs in front:
Below, you can see my homemade color-picker tool, ha. It's a little piece of paper that I punched a hole in. It helps me isolate a color in an area, if I'm not sure what color to paint it. Sometimes our brain fills in things that our eyes aren't seeing - which is what we want our viewers to do in the end, but as the artist it's my job to paint things as they actually appear to me, rather than as my brain fills them in to be. So sometimes, even though a wall may be white in real life, it actually appears gray because it's in shadow.
The completed painting.
Commissions are actually closed for now, but when I do reopen my commission schedule it will be available through my Etsy shop as a separate listing. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone - we're supposed to get over 50 degrees here in MN! Wahoo!
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