Wednesday, February 4, 2009

House Portrait - Finished Painting

In my last post I showed you some preliminary work that I did for a house portrait commission. Below is the finished painting.

watercolor house portrait painting
9.5" x 13.5" watercolor on paper
Stacy L. Rowan

There are several things that I decided to change after completing the color study.

First of all I noticed that I "shrunk" the garage door when I went from the shadow guide to the color study. So I made sure in my line drawing for the final that it read as a two car garage.

I also decided to make some changes to the roof. The angles on the hip roof were one of the most challenging parts of this drawing. While I was enlarging the garage, I decided the roof angles still needed a little tweaking. I also choose to change the roof color making it cooler and lighter in value.

The last change involved the trees behind the house. In the final painting I used more cerulean blue in the large pines to push them further into the background. I felt this helped establish more depth in the painting.

Overall I found that creating the shadow reference and color study were very helpful, especially for this challenging project. I was much more confident when I got to the larger painting because I was familiar with the subject and knew I had already solved some potential problems.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful finish Stacy. You went to a lot of work to get to your completed piece. I commend you for sticking through all the stages. I can only imagine how exciting it was for them to be given this lovely work of art.
Good goin'

M J Muir said...

Stacy if I was receiving a painting of my home and it looked like this painting and if it had your name on it I would be thrilled and delighted.
Way to go!

Robyn Sinclair said...

Your clients must be thrilled, Stacy.

Anita said...

beautiful Stacy! Well done! I bet your customers will be delighted!

Jeanette Jobson said...

This is lovely. There's lots of depth and detail. I'm sure they're thrilled with it.

I have a photo of my house that I keep threatening to paint. One of these days... :)

Rose Welty said...

Really nice Stacy. Lots of atmosphere and confidence in there...

Stacy said...

Thank you ladies! My customer was happy which always feels good. And I was happy that my prep work paid off!

Jeanette, I don't think I would paint a portrait of my own house. It has some funny roof angles too and even with a perfect picture don't know if I could push myself to do it. I'm willing to figure it out to make someone else happy, but not so motivated for myself. There are too many other paintings I'd like to do for myself first! :D

Stacy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jennifer Rose said...

the blue worked really well to add depth to the painting as a whole. well done! :D

Nothing to See said...

Gorgeous work. Fantastic.

Stacy said...

Thanks Jennifer and Ana!

Anonymous said...

Stacy, great job. You should paint a picture of your new screened porch.
Love Dad.