My apologies to all who expected
this update earlier today. Unavoidable responsibilities kept me from writing
this until this afternoon.
In middle Georgia, southeast of Atlanta, there is a beautiful little town
called Eatonton. My wife and I passed through there a few years ago on our way
south from the mountains of North
Carolina. We were taking the scenic route south for a
while, avoiding Interstate 75, and looking for good photo ops. There are
countless small towns off the beaten path everywhere that still provide great
opportunities to relax, slow down and enjoy life the way it used to be – before
everything became so hectic and rush – rush. Eatonton is one of those towns.
Although we only stopped for a short while, we were able to see some beautiful
old architecture and just stroll side streets.
On one of those side streets we
came across a beautiful Georgian Colonial home that was so picturesque. Trees,
both large and small, framed the home and trees behind it made a wonderful
backdrop. Boxwood hedges flanked the brick walk up to the front portico and
spread out on either side. I took a few photos for future reference.
After looking through many images
of homes I decided this one would make a nice pen and ink and watercolor. So I
set about doing what I need to do to get this one ready for ink and watercolor.
After doing a number of home
portraits the old fashioned way – using a grid system to enlarge an image of
the house onto tracing paper, then transferring the drawing to the final paper,
or enlarging a photo of the house and carefully measuring all kinds of
dimensions and transferring them first to tracing paper and then to the final
paper – all of which took a great deal of time - I decided to make a light box
to directly trace the image of the house onto my final paper. But, rather than
have another piece of equipment laying around, I cut out the center of my
drawing table and build a light box into it. It took me a day to do it and it
worked great. If anyone is interested in how I did it, email me and I’ll be
happy to describe the project.
After tracing the house onto Arches
140 lb watercolor paper I freehand drew the rest of the landscaping on the
paper. Since I will be adding watercolor to this drawing I then stretched the
paper by soaking it in water and stapled it to a piece of plywood. No
distortion resulted from the stretching. Attached are photos of the Home and of
the pencil drawing.
Update 2 will begin the inking of
the drawing.
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