Watercolor: Painting a House Portrait

1. Intro & Welcome!: Home sweet home, where family and friends are welcome, where big bow dreams begin, from priceless family keepsakes to whimsical decor. This is where we gather, where cherished memories and precious moments are made. Hi, I'm Jen of JSweeney Design, and welcome to our home and welcome to class. I got to tell you, I had a great time making this class for you. It did get a little bit longer than what I originally intended, but that's okay. It is packed full of all details and tips and techniques that you can use in other art projects, not just house portraits. Let me take you behind the scenes and show you exactly what you'll learn in class. We review important handouts that you won't want to miss, we practice painting options for design elements such as windows and doors, we practice some really cool techniques for stonework and brick work, as well as some options for greenery, all of these to make your portrait pop with charm and character. Our focus in class is painting. For this reason, I chose to trace our house to save us valuable time. We use the important tool of masking fluid, and I review every single step of my process for completing a house portrait. This class is designed for all skill levels. Some knowledge of watercolor is helpful. I share all my tools and brushes so you can feel confident in the process and enjoy painting houses. You'll learn how fun it is to paint details such as tiny flowers, and leaves, and these tree reflections in the window. We add some shadows to add dimension and depth. By the end of class, you will have a completed house portrait ready for framing. I am so excited to have you in this class. So grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Important handouts: Here's the cute little blue house that I picked for our reference photo. I chose this house because I just love the charm and the character that it presents here. I am going to change up a couple of things, and that's the freedom that you have when you're doing this for fun. Now, if you are doing a commission, certainly you'd want to keep it as close to the reference photo as possible. But in our house portrait today, I'm going to take out these bushes here, this one here, am going to do a little more gentle background because I want the house to stand out. You have that reference photo, also a black and white copy. The reason I did that, I like to sometimes go ahead, and now this is just card stock paper, I like to go ahead and do just a few examples because I'm also going to change the color of the roof to have it a little more natural. There's already a lot of blue in the house, but I just do this just for fun. A really quick throwing down some paint and colors and see what I like. I am going to try to represent the shadow or the reflections of the trees and the branches in the windows. Just a fun option to do that just on card stock. You don't want to use a lot of paint in water when you're doing that. Just to really get a handle on the colors. You don't need to do that, but it's just something fun I like to do if you have a little extra time. This one here, windows. Now they they do look kind of busy, these handouts. I understand that, but just go through little by little and I try to be as clear as possible about what I was doing on the different sections of the house. Brick work, a ton of fun to do bricks and here's some different options how to do that. I'm just showing these to you now because I really think these handouts are going to be invaluable to you as we go through class. Of course later on when you're doing house portraits on your own and you want to come back and refer to these pages. Just a few more examples here as well. I hope you enjoy these handouts. I had a lot of fun making them for you. Let's go ahead and we'll get on over into the next lesson. 3. Class supplies: Here are all the class supplies you're going to need. Now I know it looks like a ton and it is, but hang with me for a little bit, and we'll go through these one by one. You will find a full list under the class description section on Skillshare and also in your handouts. But let's start with these brushes. I have a variety of round brushes here, size 3, 4, and 6, some fine detaillers to get in those little nooks and crannies. A 10 over 0, and a 3 over 0. These three I love to use for the brick work. I've got a flat shader by Master's Touch. This is a 10 over 0. Now this one's also called a flat shader by Princeton, a size 2. I also love this one for brick work and number 2, chisel blender. These brushes I love to use for the landscape and the background greenery. This is a scrambler brush by, I think Artists Loft, and this one is a round blender brush, size 6 by Princeton. Grab an eraser, a pencil. For the white areas on our portrait, I love to use Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleedproof white or a Jelly Roll pen, this is a 08 by Sakura. The Signo Uni-ball white pen is really good too, sometimes I like that one a little bit better than the Jelly Roll. But we're going to experiment with those today. These two markers I used to enhance some of my brick work. This one, Pitt Artists Pen, it's a warm gray III number 272. This one, the Pitt Artist Pen cold gray IV number 233. You don't have to have these exact ones again, this is just all I'm using in class. Same for these watercolor pencils. I only use this as we go through some of the stone work and I show you some options, we're not going to use these for the final portrait. Grab some tape, we're going to tape down our paper tube or our portrait tube board as we paint. This masking fluid, the Dr. Martin Frisket Mask Liquid, I really like this, it does a nice job. We're going to block out some of our landscaping, and other areas on our portrait with this, and I like to apply it with a ruling pen. You could also use an old paintbrush too, but you want to make sure you clean that really well. I use different rulers in class, and grab some Kleenex or paper towels, your house reference photo, of course, handouts that we talked about. These are all the colors that I'm going to be using on the portrait today. Again, if you don't have these exact ones, not a problem. In fact, if you want to paint your house a totally different color and just go for it, that would be so cool. I would love to see that. We've got water jar, of course. Now I'm using a light pad today. I wanted this class to be more for painting, and not so much the architectural drawing aspect of it. We can certainly rule out our house that takes a lot of time to do and patience, and math, and all things, but just for simplicity sake, I'm using a light pad to trace the house portrait today. I'm going to be using Arches, cold pressed watercolor paper, 140 pound, and then this is actually the board I'm going to tape the portrait to to paint on, and this is a bigger size, but it's just the back of an Arches block. I always recommend saving these, tear these off and use those. It seems to work really well for me when I secure my portrait here and go ahead and paint on that or if you wanted to get a professional board to tape it down too, that's fine too. I think I covered all that, there is for class supplies, but again, you can find that in the class description area or in your handouts. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Training our eye for details: I love to be outside and walk around my neighborhood, and go to cute little towns and snap a bunch of picture so I can bring them home and study them just for some of the finer details. I'm really trying to train my eye to look beyond what I see. I'm going to run through a couple examples here, just so we can really see things together as we start to paint this house portrait. You can tell the sun is coming in this direction because here's a beautiful shadow line here, under this trellis, down on this part of the house. Over here, you can tell that underneath the porch, it's darker. Looking at this window here, I love, hope you can see it, this little reflection of this tree right here, I think that's beautiful. Looking at this window up here, you can tell these windows on the top are lighter. Bottom windows are darker. You can even see the nice little slats of the blinds. Here's some very characteristic shadow markings at the top of the window and then down the side, which will do that today. This one, I love the shadow and the trunk here from this tree. Flags are fun to paint too. This is a really good reference one. You can just really see the difference in how this is flowing here. Love the shadow of the mailbox. The fine little details on the garage, even the small little shadows from the garage handles. This one gives a perfect shadow line here. Details on the garage. Beautiful landscaping. Now this would be fun to just practice painting this, especially with this brick work down here. I would really encourage you to take some time, go out and find places and snap some pictures. Then bring them home and just study these details. It really adds a lot to our finished portrait. Even in this window here you can see where there's blue here. There is green from a tree here and down this side. Even a house, a reflection of the house here. Now you don't need to paint all these. I'm just pointing out some details. The lines underneath here. All of these looking for details. Really going to train our eye to zone in on some specific things that we want to highlight in our portrait. Beautiful landscaping here, and I love just the deep red tones of this. Take some time, go grab some pictures, and then just study these at home. I love this one in particular too, because just from this photo you can tell it's a windy day and the directional flow of this tree, I think is just beautiful. You don't need a lot of greenery to make this stand out either. Let's head on over into the next lesson. 5. Practicing windows Part 1: This house has beautiful windows, but it does not have any shutters. I love to paint shutters. Here on your handout, I did give you just a few options. Now with everything, the windows, the doors, shutters, bricks, all of these fine little elements that we're going to practice, what I'm showing you today is by no means the exclusive way to do this. There are thousands of people that do house portraits. We all do them a little bit differently. Some things are similar, but your own style is going to come through as you really hone into what you like to do, whether it's a looser style or a more tight design, which I tend to do a little bit more tight as you'll see, but just discover fun new ways how to do things. I'm going to go ahead and get this out of the way. Let me show you this fun little vintage palette that was my dad's. This is probably about 50 or 60 years old and I tell you these colors are very vibrant, I use this palette a lot. What I've done over in this one, the black, the cobalt blue and the burnt umber are all from this Baraboo palette. The shadow violet, Daniel Smith, which I absolutely love and I'm finding I'm using it a lot these days. If you don't have this, what is in it is, you find the right spot here. Pyrrole orange, ultramarine blue, and viridian, which I was surprised to see that. But this is what makes up the shadow violet. Another way to mix a pretty gray is very commonly ultramarine blue and burnt umber or ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. It's a mouthful there. But I really love the shadow violet and how it just blends itself to really nice corner shadows there. Because that shadow violet has orange in it, it's going to lend itself to a warmer shade of gray. I'm going to reactivate some of that here. You want to be careful with how much you use too because it can get really pretty dark. What we'll do is we'll start up here, and I'm just going to drop in burnt umber on these two shutters and always have your test page next to you as well. We're not going for perfection on these practice pages. I just want to give you some ideas on how I do my shutters. I'll turn my page and just start down here. You want to work fairly quickly. Get a good first coat down. You'll come back in here. Not right at the edge, drop some more in and drag it out. I'm trying not to overwork these, easier said than done. Got enough on that first one. Clean up some of those hard edges there, but I tend to do some micron outlining after the paint has dried. That tends to hide some of those hard lines too. We're going to let these shutters dry for a little bit. Now that these are dry, I'm going to grab one of my detail brushes, get into some thicker burnt umber, and then we're basically going to just draw in these rectangles here. When I sketched it out, once you put watercolor down on your pencil, that's not going away. I can still see the little outline there and that acts as a good reference for me. Steady hand, no caffeine when you're doing this. I'll get back in there and then I'll darken up one side. It's amazing how just adding some dark lines gives depth and dimension. I'll do that on the top. I'm going to do this one at the bottom, I'm sorry. I'll let that dry just a little bit. We're going to hop on over to this one. We rinse my brush and then I like to use this number 2 chisel blender, and just very simply, add these panels. Sometimes I'll measure them out, sometimes I will just guess, but this is just practice here. Then I'll get back my little detail brush, and add some of these lines. You could add the lines first and then do the panels, whichever you prefer. We're going to let this dry just a little bit longer and we'll just add some lines here just for a different look to the shutters. We'll let that dry, and I'm going to pop over to this one here. Just again, to add some depth and dimension, I'll take a micron sometimes and just underline this one here, the middle one. Add a little bit of shadow to it. Easy way to do that. Do it along these slides too. Could certainly paint these in, but sometimes it's just easier to grab the micron. To finish this one off, to give it some more depth and dimension, I'm going to grab the white jelly roll and then just get in there and get some white lines go in. Sometimes I'll start with this jelly roll and then grab the signal and go over it again or use the bleed proof white. Sometimes that signal, the white comes out a little bit thicker than I would want. So just to give you an idea, this is how I do it. Just ways to cast shadows and highlights. I would grab this one, just use a light hand. This one almost comes out of the pen without really even touching on too much onto the paper. We're going to leave that one go. We're going to hop down here and do this one. 6. Practicing windows Part 2: A couple of ways you can do this bottom one, either a wet on dry, wet on wet, whichever you prefer. If we went ahead and then let's just do some wet on wet here. Nice sheen of water over this here. Dab a little off. You always want to start light. I Just pop a little bit in the corner there. Rinse my brush, dab it a little bit and then just tease it around a little bit. Some spots I'm leaving dry just being a little irregular, [inaudible] the fun comes in where you just experiment with this. Sometimes I get caught up doing these corners, but then I forget, well, I'm going to go back in and add some shadows, so these corners don't need to be perfect. Let's let that dry just a little bit. I'm going to get in here and wet this again. I want this a little bit darker because I'm going to add some of the blinds too. I want you to be able to see some of the white lines to this. Just dropping this in and letting it do it's thing. If I really wanted to get particular and soften these edges here, I could do that just with a damped brush, but in the grand scheme of things windows, on a house they're so small, so try not to get all caught up in all of the little details. But one thing I like to do when I'm doing blinds, I'll grab a ruler. I guess that'll line things sometimes and just go on slow, crossed, edge to edge here. Going slow with this pen tends to work better. If you go too fast, then either it just doesn't come out as well. That's just a fun detail to add to your windows. You can even use a small liner brush for this and use some of the shadow gray or the bleed proof white. Sometimes it is just fun to draw lines in to add that look. Make sure you get that off of your ruler. We're going to let this dry just a little bit. I'm going to turn it, and then just to add the chords, just give this a few, few minutes or so to dry. Can I just eyeball on this. Just a fun window with some blinds and chords. We'll let that dry all the way. Then we'll add some shadows to the corner. With the number 2 chisel and I'm getting into my shadow violet. Then just like I have up here on line this way, and then to the top. Let's just go ahead and micron this until it looks like a window. Then once this area's dry, just as up here, I'll take them micron and outline even more. This is the 005, you can always go back and darken it if you need to. But I've learned to just go light. Go back in when you need to know. If that bleeds down a little bit, not a big deal. Sometimes what I'll do too is just even add little bit of black along the chords here. I think that one is done. Let's move on to this one. I'm going to make the top window darker and let this one be a little bit lighter. I'm going to go over all of this here, because we'll come back in with the bleed proof white, and separate those windows. While that's still wet, I'll grab a tissue, and just dab some of that out of there and lending itself to some reflections. But we'll get back in there and I'll add a couple more smudges to it to make it look even more pronounced with some reflections, but we'll let this dry first. For the white crossbars, I'm going to grab the bleed proof white, but what I'll do sometimes is I already have my little tick marks here where those crossbars were. I will just see how straight we can do this. A couple of lines. Now free handing it is really probably the best way to go. This can get a little tedious sometimes, but just for some guidelines there, just showing you a couple of different options. This can get a little thick, so I just take some output at my palate. Then with the detail brush. Sometimes I'll use masking fluid too, to block out those crossbars for the window panes. Like I said, there's so many different ways to do that, and then I'll let that dry a little bit. It dries really pretty fast, and then I'll, sometimes get back in there with bleep roof white again or grabbing one of the white pens. I'm just going over it. Certainly these are huge windows compared to what we're going to paint on the house, but just to give you an idea. Go ahead and micron this out. Then to add just a few more reflections in the bottom part of that window, we'll get some more shadow violet. Then I just randomly make marks in that bottom area. Soften out some of the edges, by just giving it a little bit more depth and dimension. Don't want to overwork it too much. Let's leave these windows as they are. We'll head into the next lesson. 7. Practicing the door: This house has the cutest little wooden door. That's the one we're going to practice today. It is in your handouts, how I do that. Now, this door is pretty typical with the panels. We're not going to practice this one because this is exactly the same as we did with the shutters. This one was just fun to do with the red door and then with the blue shading and for the windows and some reflections there. But let's go ahead and practice this door here. I'm going to go ahead and get my paint over here. This is CPM that we're going to be using today. This is Winsor & Newton. This brush, it's a big one because this door is huge compared to the one that we'll paint for the house. But it does mimic this chisel blender. The cool technique with this, this is all about dry brushing. I'm just going to load this brush, pull my test page a little bit, and just like it sounds, I'm going to be using that dry brush technique for the wooden slats. Get some of the wetness off of your brush. This is going to be pretty irregular, so it really doesn't matter too much here if some are darker than the others. In fact, that's what you want. You're going to lay your brush down at the bottom and just quickly move to the top. You can even go back and forth a little bit. One section is in, because they're not all the same. I usually do a couple of layers of this. It will start to look like a wooden door soon. Hopefully you're in. Now, you could use some masking fluid for this window if you wanted to, but we're not going to do that right now. That will dry fairly quickly. I'm just going to go over this again. Sometimes what I'll do also is have an under-wash of maybe a very creamy color or maybe a very light yellow ocher. We can go over that as often as you would like and get a couple of darker spots here. That's pretty much the technique for getting the background of the door down, and then what I'll do, still using sepia, add some of these little knots random spots, not too many, just to give the impression again that this is a wooden door. You want to make sure it's not too thick, but not too thin either. Then you're just going to take your detail brush and go up and over these little areas. Some wavy lines on a wood door is good. You can even put some half circles around the main knob there. Just an easy way to make a wooden door. You'll get some darker straight lines in there to really simulate each separate board. You want to be a little loose and a little irregular with it. I'm going to switch out my brush. I'll just get some shadow violet for the window, or you could use black. Sometimes I'll just take that tissue paper towel, dab a little bit and then just let that dry. Let's get in there and add a shadow on the corner, and do the opposite side here, and the one above it. Let that dry. I can add a few streaks of micron with some reflection. Very simple. Then also grab in the white pen, darken some of these micron lines, especially where the shadow is. Sometimes I'll even sketch a little bit out here, right that corner. Then get a little door handle in here. You can either paint that or micron that in. Sometimes I'll add a few dark lines on the door too. For the finished portrait, I would certainly go around and darken this too, but just for the sake of time, we'll speed through this. 8. Practicing bricks: These fun little bricks, I tell you what, if you ever want a therapeutic activity, just paint a wall of bricks. It is so fun to do because sometimes we get so caught up in something really detailed and trying to figure out the composition. Sometimes just painting the same strokes over and over and having a really cool result is really what we need sometimes. Let's get into this. What I like to do, this buff titanium I found is really great for an under-wash for these bricks, especially the brown tone bricks. I usually lay down a quick light wash of that, which we'll do on our house portrait today. Then I use my number 2 chisel blender. I'm also finding, I just got this brush, the number 2 flat shader, I really like this one too, it's a little bit smaller than the chisel blender. Then even this brush, this is also called a flat shader by Master's Touch, a 10 over zero. I like this one too. I tend to use that one a lot for the shingles on the roof. When we're talking about our bricks, you want to keep the alignment in mind. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you want to align your bricks so it's appealing to the eye. Let's jump in and I want to take you through how to do this. Grabbing my chisel blender and I'm going to be using sepia, a little bit of Indian red, some black, maybe even some burnt umber. We'll just go with it and see what we come up with. You want this fairly watery, tissue in hand and then all you do, light hand, easiest strokes ever. Could not be simpler. If it gets too watery for you, just dab. Now the second line here, I'm going to do a little bit of a small one and then go under this white spot here just so we get that nice characteristic brick look. Some uniformity. I'm running out here, re-deep in the paint. Now as these are still a little bit wet, you can always go back in, highlight some of them with a new color and I tend to just go back and forth and mix these all up with my brush. Not a lot of reimer reasons sometimes, but really so much fun to do. I'm getting that alignment there a little bit, but that's okay. Let me show you with this flat shader. See that's a little bit smaller than the one above it. I'm not even rinsing, just going in there and getting more pigment. What the flat shader looks like, this one, that's this guy down here. I tend to push a little bit more with this brush just because it's a lot thinner. But very good for roof shingles. The way I like to highlight these, grabbing my micron and just doing some underlining on some of these bricks, doesn't have to be all of them. Maybe on the sides. Couple little dots. See how relaxing this could be. Painting a wall of bricks, maybe adding some florals, a little flower pot around it, a window box of flowers, so fun. So many different options, and then I'll grab the white pen. Sometimes just do a few little streaks, maybe on the darker ones or even the lighter ones show up too. That is it for this part of the bricks. Let's go ahead, I want to show you this part too. These bricks are even easier, but they give such a beautiful eye appeal. Everything explained in your handout, but let me walk you through how I do this. I typically do an under-wash of one color or a combination of colors, just laying down the Indian red deep or the burnt yellow ocher and then dropping in some different pigments such as black or sepia. Let me show you a quick video of that. Once you're under-washes dry, I come back in with my little ruler and my white pen, and just eyeballing it here, and start ruling out the mortar. Remember to wipe that off your ruler so you don't get it all over the place. Then you just come in and mark in the lines. Now what I'll do, I'll leave this one blank and I'll come down, I'll just do the same line. Try to keep it straight, a little hard on video sometimes. Then I'll pop back up into this one. You can do it any way you want to, that's just how my eyes are trained to do it. We'll let this white pen, the marker get set for just a moment. Once that's dry, I grab my two gray markers and then just come in randomly filling in the bricks. Could not be any easier. Sometimes I'll go over the light one a few times, it's a light marker. You don't have to fill them in perfectly either if you just want to do some marks like this. Easy enough. Come back in with some micron dots. Then what I'll do too is underline the white mortar, sometimes with the black micron. Always looking for added depth and dimension. I can go down the sides, something just to pull the eye in. Same down here. I rule out with black micron. Then I'll take my lighter marker and I'll add a little shadow underneath here. A little hard to see that. Going over it twice. I think the other one be a little too dark for this. One other quick way I can enhance these bricks even a little bit more, I'll grab my round brush and just get in here and do a little bit of dry brushing. Have your Kleenex by if you want to dab a little bit out. But just adding some more texture onto these bricks. Very simple. Maybe a little black. This is where you can be just really pretty carefree with this. I could do this all day long, but we better move on. Very simple process. This is the same one, so I'm not going to mark this out. It's exactly the same up here, using the different markers to make it dark. But the best part about this that I love is the splatter effect. The way I do that is get just some bleed proof white, you want it pretty watery. If you need to block anything out, do that. I'll grab another brush, do a little bit of a test over here and then just randomly tap. Adds a nice dimension to your bricks. That is it. Now we're going to work on some stone work. 9. Practicing stones: Stonework, another fun and relaxing thing to paint. As with our watercolor, we have to look beyond what we see. First, we see all these beautiful stones with different tones, the splatter effect. But we got to start at the bottom. We got to do it under wash first, and I just chose shadow violet for this one. We let that dry and then we start dropping in our stones, dropping in some other pigment while it's wet. Let that dry and then add some of the splatter or other little fine details. This one down here, it's the same technique of the under wash as we did with the brick where we lay down one wash, and while it's still wet, we drop in some other colors. Let's go ahead and do this here. Got my round brush number 3, tissue in hand. Then we just go in and start dropping in some stones. The fun part is you can be irregular about this. As close as you want or given it some space. Then while these are still wet, what I'll do sometimes either leave them like that or drop in just a touch of sepia. You can see the blue and the shadow violet. You want to make sure you're mixing that up as you go. Let's drop in a little black. We usually do it on the underside. If you see some hard edges just with that damn brush, go ahead and get back in there. So much fun to do this. If you don't like how it looks, dab it. Pretty simple. I just love the look of stone walls, and it just reminds me of England, which I've never been there. But it would be so much fun to go and see all the old buildings and architecture. Goodness, that would be so cool. This is just a little burnt umber, I wanted to see what that look like. Could even go back and do some more on that one with some sepia. Let's let that dry. We'll come back in and do a few more highlights. To give these stones some depth and dimension, all I'm going to do is take my little detail brush, and just highlight the bottom of these stones. Little jagged movements. Can do some in a different color to a little bit of black. You won't do all of these, but just this is a technique to give a little bit of shadow under your stone. You can grab the micron and do the same thing. I know some of these are still wet and that's actually okay, bleed a little bit in there. But just to experiment with how much or how little you want to add. I'm going to add some of the dots, but you can quickly see how that adds a lot. Pool in the eye in. If you wanted to go back and rewet some of the stones and drop in some more pigment, different colors to make it even bolder, bigger contrast like down here, that would be great. I won't do the splatter effect, but that's just another option that you could do to really bring out some beauty of the stone. We're going to attempt this guy. Actually, a couple other ones, I did these along time ago, just very loose, just different colors, just a lot of splatter. Not typically my style, but I'm really starting to love this. Just getting out of our comfort zone is and to try new things and to get my brain out of that perfectionist mode where everything has to line up and we need to get rid of that because sometimes that is just going to wreck our creativity. Let me grab some supplies, and we'll get started with this one. Let's go for it on this one. Feeling a little feisty with this one. I want to try some bold colors. Let's just see what happens. It's fun to play. Sometimes you just got to go for it and try new things. Laying down some shadow violet. Then while that's still wet, I want to actually drop in a little bit stronger shadow violet, more concentrated. This is a little Payne's gray. This is from the marabou set that I showed you earlier. Very pretty color. Let's try a little this Indian red deep. Then even a little black. Just be free with your strokes. Let put that to the side. Now that's still wet. I'm going to dab it just a little bit. Because what I like to do next, even though it's wet, I get in here with my ruler and a water color pen, line that out. Pull this up, very cool technique there. Wipe that each time. Definitely going to remove some of your pigment, but that's totally fine. Just get in here and play with it. Practice some techniques. Just for a very cool look. Now we're going to let this dry completely and then come back and do some more detail work. Now that this is dry, we can get in. I've got my round brush again, we're going to do a little bit more. Just carefree dry brushing, very loose. Don't even have to stay in the lines. Switching up some colors. Just having fun name of the game with this. I'm just going back over. I'm not even sure which ones I just did, but just adding some color adding some different tones there. I want to make this bigger now. It's fun. I would leave that for now, just some different ways to do that. Also another fun thing to do, now this is a charcoal pencil. You can use a regular pencil, a micron, but just going in and adding a couple little cracks. Always fun. Then I like to just highlight those sometimes, the white underneath. Just again give it some irregularity. Then for the splatter effect. Let's try that. Let's do that with some of the shadow violet here. Have fun with these and if you make one, I would love to see them. We would just let that dry. Actually, let's add some bleed proof white on this one too. Once that's dry, I might go back in and darken up some of these lines here and maybe add some white off to the side of some of these lines. But it's just a fun way to experiment and try some new things. If you do one of these stone walls, and you're just getting crazy and feisty and you want to share it with me, I would love to see it. Just upload it into the project gallery or an Instagram. But just have fun with that. Let's head on over into the next lesson. 10. Practicing greenery Part 1: We want our landscape and our greenery to enhance our house portrait, not to overtake it. As always, I'm going to refer you back to the handout for a lot of details, but we'll go over a few examples in this lesson. Right now, I'm going to just go ahead and walk you through how I do one of these little trees here. I'll grab in my round brush. I'm going to get into some of my sepia here. Do a little test. Then I typically start from the bottom and go up. Nice straight. Let's start down here a little bit more. Just have some little branches going out this way, but going in that V-shape. Just laying this down pretty quickly. Just to get a sense of where I'm going to go with my branches and my leaves. Then I will drop in a little bit of sepia usually along one side. If you don't like that, you can always pull some of that out to give a nice highlight there. You never want your tree trunks to be just one solid color brown. You want to add some life to it, so you get to play around with it a little bit. You might even drop the little black in. I'll leave that for the trunk, and then what I'll do is now this is purely in green, and I really love that color. I'll start dropping in just some light areas. Randomly following along where branches would go, leave in some white space. Didn't really give myself a whole lot of room here. But just to get the idea how to do this, sometimes what I'll do is depending on how big my tree is, I might use this flat shader brush because it gives all these tiny nice little leaves at the bottom here and throughout the middle. I can easily overdo this. Once that's dry, I'll come back in with a little bit darker green. Just basically pushing it in here. Once that's drying, I will come in with a little smaller brush and start adding maybe some branches here. Darken up some areas. I think you get the idea there. Once this is all the way dry, then I tend to take my bleed proof white or one of my white pens and then just do something like these little random white marks up here. Even down the side of the trunk sometimes. This I would probably darken up a little bit more, but you get the idea there. Let's go ahead and move on to some of these bushes. This is how I do my background trees too. My fun little brush, this scrambler brush. Now, I do have this all taped up because it got really sticky. So I had to put this tape around it, but this is the scrambler brush from artist's loft. What I like to do for these, now, this is just the pure lean green. Let's just get a little bit light layer to start with. Basically all I do is start just going in the shape of the bush, tapping in very lightly. Just gives these beautiful markings. Couldn't be simpler. You could do this with a round brush too, but I just really like this brush. Then when it's still wet, sometimes what I'll do is go in a little bit darker. Usually on one side. These don't look much once you're just looking at this. They look like little green blobs. But once you get it in the full context of the landscaping and the house, it certainly gives you the impression that there's a bush there. So just add a little landscaping there, then a mulch. Easy enough. That's just the one color, and I would do the same thing with a white pan. I will go in and just add some of these little markings just for some highlights. Now, once this is dry, I would maybe go back in and add just a touch more to darken up some of these areas. Again, that's pretty easy to overdo too. Now, this little bush with these trunks, I started with some sap green, just to give it some contrasts there. But basically the same idea. I'd let that dry a little bit or even dab off some. Then get back in there with a little bit thicker perylene green. Just a super simple way to do trees and bushes. 11. Practicing greenery Part 2: Moving on to this one here, so this I used the masking fluid, this one, the Dr. Ph. Martin's Frisket Mask Liquid. I really like this. Here, I've already laid it down, but let me show you how I do that with the ruling pen. I'm sure a lot of you have already done this and know how to do it, but in case you don't, I just go ahead and dip it in and then just light strokes wherever you're going to place the flowers or the greenery. Rinse that off. So then over on this one here, it's already done. If I get in here and add some blue right over the masking fluid, then I don't have to worry about getting in between all the nooks and crannies there. Then a little flowerpot. I'm not trying to be too particular here, just giving you the idea how this works. Then we need to let that fully dry. Let's say here is where we could add a couple of these little white highlights. Again, it doesn't look like a whole lot right here, but in the context of all the landscaping. It's really pretty easy and pretty fun to do. We could darken up this one. Just being cautious how dark you go, just all these fun little details. You can take this little flat shader. Just push in a few little more dark spots for contrast. This is another relaxing part of doing house portraits. You can just focus in on one area and just really play around with it and just enjoy the process. Couple little wispy ones off to the side. Darken up some of these little branches. Right now that this one is dry, all I do is just take my finger and rub off that masking fluid, grab my little detail brush and just get in there and add some greenery. I'm not going to cover up all the white here, I like that for some contrast. This green would go over the blue too if I didn't use the masking fluid. But I like the masking fluid because of the white that it leaves. Then we can get in there and add still little more white highlights. For the florals, we'll go ahead and do that during the portion where we're painting the house. But it's pretty much the same concept with the masking fluid. You can maybe clean up these little guys, add some more there. All right. I think that's going to do it for our landscape and greenery. I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Prepping, tracing, pencil & micron: Okay. I hope you're still with me. We need to get this house penciled in on our watercolor paper. I'm going easy peasy and I'm going to use my light pad to trace the outline of this house. I say easy peasy, but it's really still, you have to be very careful how you are doing this, and it can get a little tedious sometimes. For me, the process of ruling it out and not using the light pad is a whole lot more work in math. Let's face it, I hate math, so I'm going to do it this way. I have my T-square, my pencil, my eraser, some tape. Let me move some of this out to show you first. I have a 10 by 14 piece of watercolor paper by arches. I also, when I do an 8 by 10 photo, I run to Hobby Lobby and I get some of these mat boards. This as 8 by 10 photo size for 11 by 14 frame. I always think a finished portrait is going to look so much better behind mat added frame. Behind glass, of course, it's just going to protect it, even more, and it's just going to look more professional. These are, yeah, $5 for these little mats. I also like it's a double mat that has an extra edge here too. So what I like to do, and I'm going to have to obviously cut the back. As you can see, it's going to overlap here on the sides. I just take my pencil, outline this portion, and there we have R-square for a house. Now I say this with caution because you have to allow yourself room to paint on the sides. Because if you just use this, you're going to get yourself blocked in very tightly. You've got to give yourself some room on the sides, and I'll show you that more when we tape it down. You could easily measure out 8 by 10, 9 by 12, 11 by 14, and just do your dimensions that way as opposed to tracing the inset of the mat. But I just find this to be really easy. I've got my light pad underneath. It is upside down right now because I need the chord on the left side. What I do, I'm going to grab my image and some tape. Try to center that. Looking at the top and the sides, the bottom, I'm just eyeballing it and make sure it's not going to wiggle on you. My paper. I'm not sure if you can see the pencil lines. I think you can, here. I just start eyeballing it first. Sometimes what I do, I line up this edge at least to know that my papers straight. But looking at this corner, I've got a little bit of room here, much more room over here. I know, I need to slide it. I pay attention to the top and the bottom. Now if I was going to do calligraphy down here with the client's name and the address, I would certainly pull it down and give myself a whole lot more room. For this one, we're just going to paint it. Grab my small ruler. This is just over a centimeter from this side to that tip of the roof line, and that looks pretty even there. You can see on this side, my paper is not straight. Again, it doesn't have to be, you can always trim your paper as you need it. But it's helpful to just get in that habit trying to make things as straight as possible. I'm going to go ahead and take this down and then we've got a few other things to check. I grab my T-square, lay it along the side. Sure. It's nice and flush. I move it up and down the roof line and eyeballing to see if that's straight. I can see that's a nice straight line there on that roof line and up at the top. I will speed through a lot of this tracing process just because I think you fall asleep if you watched me trace this for the next 45 minutes or so. But I'm going to trace the general outlines. I'm not going to rule it, as I trace it. I generally just take my pencil, go in, get the outlines down where the windows are, all of the main features of the house. I'll block out some lights here where the pots are. I'll even sketch in where the greenery is going to go and sidewalk all of the good stuff here. Once I'm done with that, I'll come back in and then I will take my rulers and straighten up the lines a little bit more. Once the basic sketch is done, turn this off. Then I pull back my mat again just to get an eyeball. Now we do have leeway here if we need to go up or down, I just line that in here. I think that looks pretty good there. So what I'm going to do next is, go off camera and just clean up some of these lines. I said, what I'll do is get back in here. This little guys wonky here. I grab my T-square most likely, and then just straighten up all of these lines, and then we'll get in there and micron the dimensions of the house. Now, that I added the lines that I missed and straightened things up, next, we're going to grab our black micron 005, and with a very light hand, go over our pencil markings. I'm not going to outline the garage light or the porch lights, nor am I going to outline the bushes or the flowers, we're going to use our masking fluid for that. I apologize, I need to go off camera to do this again, to just really get in there very closely to see what I'm doing. Once we're all done with that, next up, we're going to add some masking fluid, and then we're going to get to painting. I promise we'll get there. Thank you for hanging in there with me. Let's go ahead and get ink on our paper, and then I will meet you back here. 13. Securing portrait and masking fluid Part 1: Now that our micron is down, the pencil line is underneath, the micron have been erased, I wanted to walk through a few of the changes that I did make and you can refer to your black and white handout for this. But when I pull in my reference photo, just so you're aware, I added a tree, just because we don't have a whole lot of room to work with here. We're not going to be able to capture all this beautiful greenery right here, but I thought it would be nice to do a tree with some branches coming off. I'm going to leave this area brick. I like the look of the brick all the way across the bottom of the house. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and do brick on the chimney too. We took that bush out and these, I like these twisty bushes, but I'm just going to add plain bushes here. Once we get to painting, I'm going to go ahead and do the roof in black. If you wanted to do a deeper blue, feel free to do so. We'll just do some light greenery on the sides here. But as we're painting and if we see something different, we might want to try, we just might do that. The other thing I did off camera too, I went ahead and cut my paper just because it's going to be easier to work with that and to be able to turn it side to side is I need to and I've got a smaller board here as well. It's still the back of an arches block, but I went ahead and grabbed the smaller one. Just to clear up some confusion too about the mat, you don't have to use the mat if you don't want to. Perfectly fine. I did want to point out again and remind you that the inset is seven and a half by nine and a half, technically not an 8 by 10 portrait. Keep that in mind when you're tracing this. If you have a client that once an 8 by10, they need an 8 by 10 and you've got to measure it out all the way. Now, people do portraits very differently sometimes where they do a paint side to side, top to bottom, or they have it more almost in an oval shape and lots of white space around. It just depends on what the purpose of your portrait is going to be. But just really keep in mind your measurements and what you're going for, especially if it's for a commission. If I was going to do an 8 by 10 and the client did not want to mat, I would certainly do 8 by 10, but I would leave a quarter inch of white space all the way around. That gives the client the opportunity to either leave it as is and just put it in an 8 by 10 frame, or you can still mat it and put it in a larger 11 by 14. Time to take this down. I'm going to leave about not quite a fourth, maybe about an eighth of an inch all the way around. I tend to tape this down really well, sometimes I feel like I over tape. But since I'm not stretching my watercolor paper beforehand, I try to keep it as secure as possible. I do have some buckling with this, which is very, very common. But once you get it under glass in the mat frame, if that's what you're using, that helps and I leave it dry on this board for a good day or two. Then I want to get in and lightly erase some of these lines here. Don't have to do it all the way, it's still going to be a guide for our mat frame. A lot of this will be covered with darker greenery anyway. But definitely up here, if we're going to do a sky. Let's go ahead and get this all the way out of there. Now let's get this masking fluid down. I'm going to take the dropper, set that aside. Grab your old paintbrush, ruling pen, whichever you want to use. I tend to do just a few little test areas. Now with this ruling pen, the dial, you can open and close this as much as you want. Certainly to keep it tighter for those thinner lines. Like with our greenery or open and it a little bit wider. It's going to give you a whole lot more in there, but it tends to get pretty gloppy. Be careful how much pencil you have underneath your masking fluid. Sometimes it sticks to it and it doesn't erase your pencil lines as much as you'd want to, so just take note of that and be careful not to have really dark pencil under your masking fluid. Let's block out these garage lights. The new porch lights. Just making little squares here. They don't need to be perfect, we're going to get back in there with black paint, but I want just some white to be shining through to give the impression of the light. I'm going to go ahead and put this on the little flower pots too. It's a lot on that one, but it'll settle down. Plus we've got paint and micron we can just fix any mistakes we need to. That's kind full right there, but again, it'll be fine. Now for the flowers, I tend to just do clusters of dots, some big, some small, because I'll go over that with either green or where the mulch is going to be. I change this part of the landscaping too. 14. Masking fluid Part 2: Just some squiggly lines here where these bushes are going to go. I can even block out where some of the bushes separate. I don't need to do this whole bush, but just because we're going to lay some buffed titanium down here just so I don't get it in that bush. That green would cover it anyway though. We'll have brick here and down here too. Try to make them a little bit larger areas. I'll go ahead and block out the window here too. These little lights up here, just a couple dots. Block out just this little edge of the flower box there, and then I think I'm going to go back and do some here. We'll see this a little bit tight squeeze here, but we'll see how this goes. I think that is it. Now we've got to let this just totally dry before we put down any paint. 15. Painting the house Part 1: We are finally ready to paint this house. First up, the blue for the main portion of the house, that's only color you need in your palate right now. Next on deck is going to be the buff titanium, because we're going to do that as an underwater for the brick. Let me get this out of the way. Have your reference photo close by. The way I approach a house portrait, I tend to get the first washed down of the big elements and then it's anybody's guess after that, I tend to jump around a lot, but I'm going to try to go in a sequential patterns so that it makes sense to you. Other thing I like to do sometimes when I'm looking at a Whiteboard here and I'm going to lay down the first layer, especially in this tricky little area here, I'll take my pencil and since we're doing blue first, I know this little section is blue and it is up here too. But knowing me, I'm going to put it right here. I just put a little x where I'm not going to go. I know that sounds silly sometimes, but it just keeps my eyes focused where I need to go and where I need to stay away from. I'm going to grab just a plain piece of tracing paper because I'm going to start up here on these two sections of the house first. I just don't want my hand and the fuzz from this glove to get into. I mean, this is dry but just to protect it. So my blue, my paints gray blue from my [inaudible] is all ready to go. You want it fairly liquid and you want to make sure you've got enough for the area that you're going to cover. I always say too, the first layer first is the worst. Just getting down that layer is most important right now, we're going to clean up lines later. You know there's going to be some wobbly lines and things like that, but don't worry about that and I may speed through some portions of the class lessons as we're painting. I don't want to overwork these layers in their beginning here. Again, the first wash is going to be fairly light. We can always go back and add what we need too on a second layer. Let's move down to the lower section. Even though I can see this white here, I'm not going to go back in and add that, that's a prime spot to get one of those watercolor blooms. I'm just going to leave it alone. All right, so that's going to do it for the first layer. Hard to do this on camera sometimes, but like I said, I see some of these little lines that are spaces that didn't quite get filled in. But that's okay, we're going to come back, add another layer, especially under this porch because it's always going to be darker under there. But we've got to let this dry completely first. All right, first layer is dry. So I think I'm going to just go ahead and darken up this area around the window just because it's back set in the porch a little bit more. I'm going to leave this alone, this alone too, just because this door is going to end up being pretty dark. I don't want to go ahead and just darken up everything right off the bat here. Even these little white lines that you can still see, not a big deal. We are going to go back in at the end and micron this out a little bit more and even add some shadow work underneath the roof line here. I'm not going to freak out about that. I wanted to add some lines here towards the end as well to for some more detailed work just to mimic some citing. Let's go ahead and get in here and darken up this area and then we'll move on to the bricks. Let's grab the buff titanium and we'll work on the under-wash for all of these bricks. 16. Painting the house Part 2: I just need a very light layer of this, just so that white that's coming through it's not just shining so bright against the bricks. Just tones it down a little bit. You certainly don't need to worry about this too much because brick's going to go right over it. I'm just going to do one layer of that, we'll let it dry, and come back and do the bricks. I have a quick question for you. Did you notice that I did not draw in the bottom portion of this pillar over here. I just noticed that, as I was waiting for this to dry, I thought, I forgot to do that, so I just added that real quick. Let's go ahead and get these little bricks going. I've got my sepia, I've got a little bit of burnt yellow ocher. I'm going to use this flat shader, the number 2. I have a tissue on hand, and I think I'm going to go ahead and just do the top portions first and then come back and do the bottom. Just on my test page, there's some tiny little spots here. Just given the impression of brick, doesn't have to be perfect. I'll come back in and darken some of these. Given it contrasts with some darker sepia, and the burnt yellow ocher. I could even do a little bit of black, or some Indian red. Kind of hard to see where that masking fluid is. I'm just going to pretend I can see it. I'll add a few on this side. Now let's get in there and darken some of those up just with sepia, add a little darker pigment. Since this one was darker, over here I want to make sure I got back and made that look fairly uniform. Remember you can use your tissue just to damn, if you feel like that's too dark. I'll try a little bit of this burnt yellow ocher, and water that down a little bit more. Does give it a nice contrast though. I'll get back in there with a little more sepia, and even darken some up right over that burnt yellow. It's pretty dark in the reference photo. We don't have to follow it exactly, of course. Let me even try and little bit of black, I've got some black off-camera there. Just to add that into to see what that looks like, I like that. It's pretty watery, so it's really even hard to tell that it's black. How about we leave the bricks as they are right now, we'll certainly come back in and add all those fun little details at a different point. But let's go ahead and move on to the door since we've got our sepia here already, let's go ahead and do the door. 17. Painting the house Part 3: Grabbing my number to chisel, getting back in my Sepia. Remember the dry brush technique for this door. Turn it this way, get a little better handle on it. I'll let that dry just for a minute and then we'll get a darker layer over that, couple little test runs. We don't have a lot of space to work here, so I don't want it too saturated. We may just need to do a couple layers. I think that looks pretty good. We'll add a few little knots, and then with the detail brush we'll do that. Then we'll switch out for the even smaller detail brush, this is the 10 over zero, some of these fine lines. Let's add our door handle then we're going to move on to the windows. You want to grab your black and your shadow violet for that. 18. Painting the house Part 4: For these windows, what I would like to do, I'm going to put the lack in the garage windows and in here and then we're going to come back once we do all the detail portion and use our bleed proof white. These, I'm going to do shadow violet in a light color because I want to do some tree reflections. We'll see how that goes. But as you can see on the reference photo, you can see right through here and you see the chair and the lamp, and a picture, a fireplace. I think that is, but we're not going to go for that, we're going to try to do if you can see there's a little bit of tree reflection and I thought that was really pretty. We're going to attempt that, so let's get our shadow violet down first. Again, a light layer of that. I'm still using my number 3 round. You can even dab that just a little bit. I got to get my X's out of there, I'll erase those eventually. Because we have our masking fluid, we can go right over that of course. What I'll eventually do is get in here and add some green, and then we will rub this masking fluid off. We have spots for our flowers. But I'm going to try to be fairly even on where the windows, and go down a little bit further. Let's move on to our black. Now rub this off out. That's actually probably dry. Let's go ahead and run that off. Just add a little shadow violet. Now rub that side, let's go ahead and get the black in these other windows. A little bit of Adeline there, no big deal. I really admire people that do the very blue style. I tend to just stay pretty tight. I think you can tell that by now. But whatever style suits you is what I want you to work with this portrait. If you like tight, try to stay tight, if you like loose, I'm trying to do some loose things, but I tend to fall back into the same pattern only to get another coat on that, probably they used two. Definitely get another coat on these two. I'm going to let these dry and then we'll do that. Last one,so much layering, so much drying, but so relaxing too. We will let that dry as always and come back and do the next part. 19. Painting the house Part 5: It was bound to happen. I forgot to do this part here. When we had the CPN doing our door I should have done this part here, but still plenty of time for me to forget more things. But let's go ahead and get that wood in up on the ceiling there. We'll try to do some more of the dry brushing. Now, this is the little 10 over 0 flat shader, I'm going to use for that part. I want it light to begin with. It's just a tight little area up there. We want to leave it sketchy looking up here to give the impression of wood. Just safer to start with more of a dry brush than going in like we did the first layer with the blue on the house and then just fill it in from there. I might actually want to soften that out a little bit more, so with a damp brush. We will let that go and move on. I'm going to get in here on these two portions here, I'm going to add some sap green and a little bit of pale-lean green here, and then add some mulch down here. I'll use some burnt umber for that. That way, we can let those areas dry and then we can get rid of all of this masking fluid. I know we've got the roof and all of this to do up here, but let's work on these little areas right here. Right over the masking fluid and then we'll just drop in a little bit of pale-lean green. We can always add more once we get that masking fluid off and we have enough spots for our flowers. Then we can go in and add more green if we need to. Let's get some little bit of burnt umber. Sometimes, it's a surprise when we take this masking fluid off and we have to rethink and re-plan how we're going to do some things. We got to go with the flow with this. I'm going to leave that alone. Let that dry, then we'll get all of this masking fluid off of here. Make sure you got good clean hands, dry hands for this. I go ahead and erase my Xs here. Right now, I feel like we've got even cleaner portrait to work with. Some nice areas for florals here or bushes. This part's turned out well here for some space and so did these here. Now, this is a little bit bigger than this one. Not a big deal, because the black, we can just extend it. This little light is peeking out from the back anyway. We might build up some of the mulch area here after we work on the florals. But I went ahead and just took it all the way off because I can get in there with a really small brush to do the individual bushes and then adding the flowers in there too. Let's move on to this roof. This big roof is just staring at us. So grab your black paint, we'll go ahead and do the roof. 20. Painting the house Part 6: Let's get the first layer of this roof down. Once it dries, we'll see if we want to do another layer or if it's ready for the shingles. We'll just wait and see. This is the number 6 round. This is coming together. First layer of the roof is done. We're going to get in there and add a second layer to that roof. It's looking a little flat as it is, so we'll live in it up a little bit with a second layer. 21. Painting the house Part 7: Time to get a touch, a cobalt blue up in our sky here. I don't want a lot just enough to give the hint of the sky since we have a lot of blue in the house already, and we're going to have plenty of greenery up here. One thing before I do that though, I don't know if anybody notice down here in this brick column, I didn't technically extend it out like I did over here. Not a big deal. I went ahead and added one tiny little brick. Not a big deal. We're going to have a lot of greenery over here anyway. Nobody is even going to notice that, but just wanted to mention that to you. Let me explain what I want to do first. I've got fresh clean water, a really clean paint brush, and I'm going to just drop in some water here at the top. Then drop in touches of cobalt blue. That's going to be at for our sky. Then I'm going to come down here and do the same wash very clean water, and then drop in a little bit of green. Just because we're going to give a hint of how the foliage is set in the back a little bit further off in the distance. A lot of it's going to be covered anyway, but just so I don't have stark white showing right through the painting all the time. Next step is this tree on the right hand side here. Remember our mark board is going to hog up nicely to this. For the tree, just like we did in practice, I'm going to use some shadow, violet, some CBS, some black go on back in there and lifting it off with a damn brush. Next up I'm going to take some more shadow violet with my detail brush and then just add some smaller trees in the back off in the distance. Same over here. I'll probably do a little larger one right here. Then I'll start getting some of these trunks here just I know where I can gauge for when I start to do the greenery. I'm not really worried about the pencil lines here. I'll erase some of those, but some are underwater color right now. We're going to cover with greenery anyway. No big deal. 22. Painting the house Part 8: Time to add some greenery down here. We're going to use this round blender, the number 6. I've got some sap green and my pure lean green. That's the only two greens I'm going to use. Sometimes I will add a light layer of yellow underneath there, but for today we're just going to do these two greens. I'm going to do a sap green first. I typically dab it off so it's not soaking wet with the tissue and then add some pure lean green and on top of that to let it blend nicely. Once it's dry, then we can get back in there and add a little bit more highlights if we need to. One way I like to soften these bushes, I like to go ahead once its dried, go back and re-wet with just clean water and then get back in there with some pure lean green. 23. Painting the house Part 9: Time to get this background greenery in here. We're going to do it the same way that we did the bushes. Start with a light watering mix of sap green, and while that's drying will drop a little bit of the peer lean green pen. I've decided to use the round blender. It's going to force me to work smaller. Sometimes when I have that bigger brush, I tend to just get out of control and do just too much greenery. We're just going to start small and build from there. I'm just going to blend this a little bit here and dab it off just to cover up some of the white just with the dab brush. Before I overdo it on the trees, I'm going to get in here and add some branches that are going to be peeking through the tree leaves here. Then we can decide if we want to do anything further with our trees. I've got two small detail brushes. I typically switch back and forth between those, but I'm going to add some shadow violet first and then darken a lot of this with the CPI. But just getting this first one down actually let me start over here. You can just go back and darken it up as we need to. Keep in some lighter, some darker good contrast. Of course, they're going to get smaller the closer they get to the top. Now I can get in there with a little shader. I know we can really overwork these trees but just going to add a little more than a few, some more leaves here. We're going to leave these background trees as is right now. While I've got my round blender, I'm going to go ahead and just add a little bit more detail on these bushes down here. Just to make this pop a little bit more and soften it with a dab brush. When we get to do on a lot of our details, will soften some of this hard green with assembly proof white or a white gelly roll pen, same thing down here too. Let's move on to the next part. 24. Painting the house Part 10: Next up, we're going to work in the window box and then down here in this portion of the landscaping plus our two little pots on the porch there. Off to the side, I have a little bit of yellow, permanent rose, my two greens, I have some burnt yellow ocher, some sepia and some burnt umber. Go ahead and grab those. It sounds like a lot of paint for a small little area here. The other thing I wanted to let you know too, so this had been drying overnight by the time I came back to this portion of the lesson. As you step away from a painting and come back, you always notice things. What I did, I added just a few more leaves here, I softened some more edges around the roof line, filled some of those white spaces in, and this tree here, I stopped the tree right here. I needed to fill it in, we didn't want just an invisible tree trunk hanging out here, so that looks a whole lot more natural. I added one little line here on the window box. I did those things off camera because I know this class is getting super, super long and that's all I did though. We're going to go ahead and we're going to get our landscaping done. With my little detail brush, I'm going to do the wet and wet technique for these florals up here. Just getting a little bit of water in these three sections here. Then I'm going to add a very light dab of permanent rose because then we'll come back later and add darker permanent rose on top of that. Same thing down here. I'm going to do some pink, yellow and pink. I know I had actually three little sprouts of greenery here, but I covered this one up. So what I'm going to do is put some greenery here, here, and then over on this side too. My light wash of water is just going to go in between here. Well, looking to to be perfect again. A light wash of the pink and then we'll get a little bit of yellow on this one here. Go a little darker on that pink. I'll leave those alone for now. Let's go ahead and work on these pots. We'll let those dry just for a moment, so we'll get down and do these little stems of greenery, whatever we want to call those. Taking a little bit of sap green. I'm going to start with my 10 over 0, go really small at first. This little brush has seen better days, the bristles are really starting to splay a little bit. Trying to keep my hand out so you can see. My apologies, I did not hit record as I went over the sap green with some more purely green here. Let's get back into these little florals here. Now all I'm going to do is just take my detail brush and just tap lightly giving the impression of some pretty pink florals in this window box. You don't need a lot. Let's get a little bit more mulch in here. Taking some of my burnt umber. I'm not too particular, I'm just going to squeeze in some in there. I can take some sepia and do some darker areas, just squiggly lines. Now to add a few more little leaves in these areas here, I've got my 10 over 0 flat shader, taking a little bit of sap green, and just little tick marks almost just to give the impression of some more leaves here. I'm leaving some of this white. I like the contrast between the white, the green, and the pink. Not everything needs to be filled in. A little bit darker green. 25. Painting the house Part 11: Next up we've got to tackle the reflections in the top window and the bottom. I'm going to do a few, light, little squiggly branches, come back in with my round blender and just tap, tap, tap a little bit of the pear lean green, just to give that impression of reflection of this tree here. I've got my small detail brush, I'm going to start on the top so I don't drag my hand through it, through the bottom one. Let's let that go. Now remember, we'll come back in with our either oblique proof wide or the jelly roll pen and add some of the window crossbars or window panes in there. Next step, I want to go ahead and get some shingles on our roof. If I would just do a couple of lines and I would take my flat shader. It's probably a little too black there. Then I just lightly push down trying to stay on that line and just push down. The other way, sometimes I'll just skip through and do it like that. But I try to just do the lines, push, line, push, line, push all the way across. Hopefully, I can stay on the line depending on how big my lines are, I usually go in between them too. Let's get these lines on there. While I'm ruling this out, I'm going to go ahead and add some lines, light pencil lines here because this is the area I wanted to add some siding. Easier way would be to turn it upside down. Since I have my 10 over 0, the tiny, tiny little detailer. Not sure if you can even see these little lines under the roof here. So in this tight little space, I'm going to go ahead and do those just because I'm thinking about it and I've got the detailer in my hand. 26. Painting the house Part 12: Let's get some gray up on the porch, the steps, the walkway, and the driveway. I'm going to go ahead and do the wet and wet for this just to give it a nice, soft look. It doesn't have to be all the way filled in. We are so close to the finish line. Plenty of detail work and things we need to fill in here, but let's tackle this front yard. A couple different ways I approach this; sometimes I'll do the wet in wet technique, other times, like I'll do today, I'll do the sap green first with just some random strokes, and then get back in with the perylene green. While that's still wet or damp, I'll add some more in. We can always soften it with just a wet, damp brush too. This is a pretty watery mix of sap green. I'm not trying to get all of the white space. Once that's dry, we'll get in and add a little bit more perylene green just for some contrast. Let's work on this little garage over here. I haven't paid much attention to it. On the website, I don't have this picture in your handout, but it does show an X pattern for the garage, which will be fun to do. I'm just going to go ahead grab my ruler and then lightly pencil that in. We'll use shadow violet for this, probably the most popular color today. Now, you certainly can freehand that, but I just went ahead and added those little Xs there, get a little bit more off of that. It's just going to act as a guideline for me. Usually make them darker on the bottom and the top. I'll just make the underside one darker using some shadow there. 27. Painting the house Part 13: Now we need to get in and do our porch lights and our garage lights. So just with my detail brush grab in some black. I'm going to just drop in some squares here. Next up, I'm going to put my paint brushes away for a moment and grab my 01 micron. I want to go over the main areas of the house and highlight this again. I'm going to be careful about how much I highlight down here. Of course, we got to do brick work and some other things but I want to go ahead and take some time to just go back in and highlight some of the main areas. I did correct this little guy here. He just was a little too big there, so I took just a touch of gelly roll pen, dabbed it on there and a little bit of a damp paint brush and just soften some of that black there. Again, no big deal. Nobody would probably even notice. I think I covered most of it. In the beginning, I said I wasn't going to do all of it but I really did most of it. I will get back in and probably do this but I want to add the white crossbars and window panes. I want to do that first before I actually go back and highlight those. Let's grab our white pen, our ruler you don't need your ruler but because I've had some caffeine, I'm going to go ahead and use that and let that dry [inaudible]. Right off the edge there. This one you're not going to be able to see too much but over those reflections, maybe you can. Since these are pretty light up here, what I like to do like we practiced before is just put a little black underneath that white that's going to bring it out nicely. Also along the side. Let's just go ahead and outline these windows. Since we've got our micron, let's go ahead and get some of this brick detail in there. This should not really seeing too much on the bricks, so I'm going to leave that alone. What I will do with this gelly roll pen is sometimes just do a few tick marks over the roof, gives it another layer of dimension. Then I'll go in and just add a few little squiggly lines. I think my pen is running out on me. Let's switch out for the other one. This one I want to be careful with because sometimes it's a little too white. You can always get back in there and soften it up with the damp brush if you need to, if you don't really like it. Let's get a couple of little shadows there. Just those little smudgy shadows with some more shadow violet. I think that's all we need there, and I think I want to darken up these reflections just a little bit. 28. Painting the house Part 14: A few more areas with shadow violet. I think, I've said that about, I don't know how many times I've said shadow violet in this class, but it's a popular one. Let's get a couple of these lines going here. Just really going over the micron with this one. Just more detail to pull the eye right in. Let's get some dark shadows under the roof line here. I can feel it. We are so close to being done. Somebody's going to have to just call me and say, "Jen, stop doing the details. You're done, you're done." But seriously, I could sit here and overwork this and overthink it, but I think we've done a great job on this. I hope you really enjoyed this class. These little lights up here too. All I want to do with those is just a little bit of highlight just to make those standout. I've got my number 2 chisel and just for some easy shadows. This is a nice brush for that. I'm going to actually start down here first. I'm going to grab my detail brush here we can do some shadows around these too. Sometimes I feel like I do things, and it's like, I don't even know if you can notice that, I will make them a little darker. One more thing, I see this little guy up here, I can just add some shadow violet of course, tone that down, top part of the chimney there. As luck would have it, just as I'm finishing up the top of the chimney here, my battery decided to die. Only thing I did was just add a couple of tick marks here on the flower pots and then underlying the door, that's all. I think, you could tell my microphone was sitting on my desk this time too. Probably enough signs for me to say, "Okay. We're done with all the details. Class needs to be wrapping up." I do want to thank you for your time. This has been a really long class and if you stuck with me through the whole time, I am so, so grateful. The class content just grew and grew but I thought it was really important to share a lot of these tips and techniques with you. I'm going to let this sit for a day or two and then we will get the tape off and we are almost done. 29. Framing, Class Project & THANK YOU!: One of the coolest parts of this whole project is taking the tape off. Also, don't forget to get your signature on your portrait, especially if you're doing on a commission. You want to make sure you sign your artwork. Let's get this tape off little by little. You want to be very careful with this. As you're pulling your tape off, you don't want to pull it straight up. Keep it low. I usually just keep my hand close to it. Last piece. I feel like we should have fireworks or something, or streamers, or all kinds of things going off for celebration. We did it. There it is, our house portrait. I hope you enjoyed this class. I had such a good time making this for you. Let me pull out a couple of the mat frames and I want to show you some options for framing. Here is our mat frame. This one is a double mat, like I talked about in the beginning. I just have the single mat, but I went ahead and got a double mat. I just love that extra prettiness around this side there. I would take my tape, of course, and some on back there, but I would tape this all around securely, making sure it's nice and centered where you want it, would also grab my T-square, and like we did when we first started, I would line up the roof line, make sure it's nice and straight before I taped it down, watching my edges here so we're able to see the whole tree here actually. Because we went outside our margins, we've got plenty of room to shift to side or side, up or down. Once that's all taped in there, that would be really nice. It's really not that buckled it all. It's got a little bit of waviness there. But because I let it sit and I just really take the heck out of this thing on the board, it did pretty good. We didn't use a ton of water just for some of the washes we did but overall, not a ton of buckling. I'm very happy with that. We could do just a simple frame. Of course, I have the glass out of here because that will give me a nice reflection and a glare. But a lot of times, just a nice simple frame will do the trick. One other option, which I think I like better, we have this black mat frame, quite dramatic, picks up the black in the roof and the windows, and then we add a white wooden frame around it. I think I like that one a lot. I got to get that centered in there for sure. But just for demonstration, I'm pretty excited about that. Again, I cannot thank you enough for hanging out in class with me. I had so much fun making this class for you and I cannot wait to see your projects in the project gallery or on Instagram. Please tag me. If you're going to do the whole house, have a ball with it. If you want to add stone instead of brick, change up the color, the roof, anything you want to do, you can just make it your own and just have a ton of fun with it. If you want to just do some windows, some stonework, some brick work, I'd be all for seeing that as well. Until next time, have a fantastic day and I look forward to seeing you in my other Skillshare classes.