This post follows the first stages of painting of a house from being sent a photo by the customer through to the finished piece in a future post. Hopefully you can pick up some tips to do your own.
1. The first scribble
This is the first bit of thinking with a pencil in hand. The idea is just to do it – get the shapes onto the paper, see where pieces join, see the spatial relationships between parts of the drawing. Here, I could see that the house was drawn slightly too wide, but it didn’t really matter that the drawing was all slanted to the right. There's not a lot of detail, and this is done with a big thick pencil to avoid getting too detailled.
2. Another scribble
Now I wanted to draw the house more accurately, and get an idea of where the finished picture would go. So I drew it out again more carefully, this time measuring the proportions a bit more accurately: not with a ruler, but by sight. I shaded in some details, and highlighted important areas with a black biro. This establishes the strong points, marking where one line expresses something in front of another, or marking where lines cross and join. This makes a more solid drawing, and puts weight into the picture without having to do too much. This is much closer to where the finished painting will go, but it is still mainly scribbling and lines.
3. Dabbling
Now it's time to start painting. I transferred the drawing to a sheet of board and redrew it. Then I start putting basic colours in for the main blocks of colour - blue sky, brown bricks etc. Because this is acrylic paint I am happy for the colours only to be indications, because I will be painting over them a lot. And for the same reason this is painted with a big brush to avoid detail. I think that's an important thing - there's no detail until almost the very end of the painting process.
This is where the painting is at present, still awaiting
detail and form, and accurate colour. In my next post
I'll finish the picture off. If you are inspired
to have a go yourself it would be nice to see the results,
which you could post to my
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