To grandmother's house we go
He was going to Idaho to visit his mother’s birthplace, a home that lives in memory of happy times spent with his parents and grandparents. He told me he was planning to commission me to paint it, even if it looked a lot different than he remembered.
It did, but he took a wealth of new photos to complement the old black and white pictures he had from the fifties. We talked about his memories and the things he’d like to have included in the painting.
Home portraits are a good solution when you can’t get everything in a photograph, as in this case. Usually, I can draw a sketch in pencil but this time, I actually painted several sketches in acrylics to see how best to include the main house, guest house, trees with swing, carport with camper, the barn in back, bridge over the creek and a view of the mountain range in the distance.
Trying to put things in context, we kept ending up with a big empty expanse of lawn in the lower right quadrant of the painting. So I thought of moving the truck with the camper shell into that space. The collector liked this idea but asked me to paint his grand-dad’s old Farmall tractor there instead. Once we had a composition that would fit into a standard size frame, we started talking about the style of the painting.
This portrait was to be a gift for his mom. After looking at examples of my finished paintings and these sketches, we decided I’d paint an 18 x 24” watercolor. Here’s the finished work, as delivered. My client had it framed and surprised his mother with it last Christmas. When I asked how it went over, he told me “She cried, which was exactly the reaction I hoped for.”
He was going to Idaho to visit his mother’s birthplace, a home that lives in memory of happy times spent with his parents and grandparents. He told me he was planning to commission me to paint it, even if it looked a lot different than he remembered.
It did, but he took a wealth of new photos to complement the old black and white pictures he had from the fifties. We talked about his memories and the things he’d like to have included in the painting.
Home portraits are a good solution when you can’t get everything in a photograph, as in this case. Usually, I can draw a sketch in pencil but this time, I actually painted several sketches in acrylics to see how best to include the main house, guest house, trees with swing, carport with camper, the barn in back, bridge over the creek and a view of the mountain range in the distance.
Trying to put things in context, we kept ending up with a big empty expanse of lawn in the lower right quadrant of the painting. So I thought of moving the truck with the camper shell into that space. The collector liked this idea but asked me to paint his grand-dad’s old Farmall tractor there instead. Once we had a composition that would fit into a standard size frame, we started talking about the style of the painting.
This portrait was to be a gift for his mom. After looking at examples of my finished paintings and these sketches, we decided I’d paint an 18 x 24” watercolor. Here’s the finished work, as delivered. My client had it framed and surprised his mother with it last Christmas. When I asked how it went over, he told me “She cried, which was exactly the reaction I hoped for.”
posted by Carol Abbott, artist at 10:21 AM
<< Home