Home Portrait Number 3

Pencil preliminary

Inked up

Here is the third of the set of three home portrait commissions from the last 2 months. Drawing and inking this was more in the normal time frame compared to the last one. The house and landscaping were fairly straight forward and easy to lay out.

This had a lot more foliage blocking the front view so I had to cut it back and move it around somewhat to expose a larger portion of the facade. Even so, that was a lot of greenery. The house itself is rather traditional so it was pretty quick pencil up and ink in.

It has been rather nice to go back and forth between these portraits and the landscape paintings. It helps keep it interesting.

Finished with pastels

This was a hard one. I probably had at least an extra day in each phase, if not two. The house itself was very complicated to lay out with its almost modular, broken up form, as were the trees in the landscaping. Colorwise, it is almost bi-chromatic (is that a word?) being predominantly gray and green. I had to find a way to accent with some other colors for establishing depth and visual interest. Fortunately, even if there were no flowers to speak of, I was able to use the pink of the garage doors and some yellow in the grass and trees to help break up the color. The chimney and the patio furniture helped some too. I ended up being pleased with it. It is actually one of the few portraits that I have done that I could see the finish of in my head before I started. Mostly I let portraits take me where they want to go. For some reason, this was different.