Work In Progress: Seven Sisters Inn, Update 6

Work in Progress: Seven Sisters Inn, Update 6

Some major changes made to the painting on this update. I’m starting to pull the entire scene together now to see how the parts fit and work together. The tedious and slow work on the House will be replaced by more loose and quicker painting of the surroundings. There’s greater opportunity to ad lib a bit.

The first thing I did was complete the foundation of the House. The brick piers, lattice work, front steps and front rail were all painted in. There may be more detail to finish up later as I look it over, but for the most part the House is done – except for the back porch, a little bit of which shows between the foreground tree and the House.

I then roughed in the lawn in the front of the House and on the side. I used hunter’s green, winsor blue, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow and raw sienna. I wanted a base color for the lawn over which I would apply the darker colors. Then I added more detail to the tree form shrub off the front steps and the hedge on the side. After that I added in the shrubs in front of the porch, using the same basic colors as the lawn but in different proportions. More raw sienna was added to keep the colors warm. Using the same colors I painted in the shrubs on the left side of the House and the larger shrubs at the far left near the front of the walk. All of this had the effect of grounding the house to its surroundings and started to give a feel of a real neighborhood House.

The house on the adjacent piece was also blue but I didn’t want to emphasize it much, so I painted it in a light wash. You can see it’s there but it doesn’t interfere with the main subject.

I filled in the small area between the House and the foreground Live Oak Tree on the right to give a feeling of trees in the back yard.

Lastly, and the part I’d been anxious to do, to see how it would affect the composition, I roughed in the dark foliage of the Live Oak overhead. For the foliage I mixed french ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and hunters green in a medium tone and then splotched it in all over, making sure I left enough sky holes. Adding the foliage already made a difference. It started to frame the House and bring more attention to it.

Next on the agenda was to work more detail into the tree and add the trunk in. I’ll take that up in next week’s Update.