diary of a house portrait

I am working on a pair of house portraits for Jo-Anne, a cellist and cello teacher in Oakville, Ontario. As they are houses I've never seen I have been relying on photographs and daily input from Jo-Anne. It's been an interesting journey, and not without a 'challenge' or two! I think the main problem is me, i.e. I hadn't actually touched a paintbrush (just lots of drawing media) in nearly four months and it took awhile for me to warm up. Doing these portraits is almost like trying to impose both the house's personality and my painting style on a jigsaw puzzle. Here's how it played out (click to enlarge or go here):

I started with complementary-coloured underpainting and began blocking in the foreground green areas.





Since I work 'backwards' the front 1/3 of the painting came first.






After consulting with Jo-Anne I painted the garage differently from its current incarnation and then started to work in some details and a few more foliage areas.



I discovered the hard way that using phthalo green as the background to pale cream-coloured bricks does NOT work. The net result makes it look like a light green house.




So I did a warm glaze over the entire brickwork using alizarin crimson, which is a strong but transparent pigment. It wasn't quite enough, though, so I ended up having to do two glazes.



Then I re-painted the bricks, one at a time, and tried to reduce the space between them. Unfortunately the colour turned out darker than the actual house.



So I added yet another coat of light, cream-coloured paint to a few of the bricks, which lightened things up considerably.





The portrait is 16" x 20" x 1.5" on gallery-wrapped canvas.