A House Portrait from Plainfield, New Jersey

by Jennifer Skopp

I was had hired to create a Watercolor House Portrait for a realtor to give to his client, the seller, who liked it so much that she commissioned me to create another House Portrait of the Plainfield, New Jersey home where her kids grew up. It was touching that the gift inspired her to want to preserve the memory of the first house that she owned.

This is a small, one-story house with a tall, pitched roof. The siding is beige and has vertical lines that give it a texture. The roof is a light reddish brown. There is a bay window to the left of the front entrance, that is made up of four narrow vertical windows. On the left side is a single window. Both windows have white shutters. The front door is a dark brown. There are two rectangular columns holding up an extension of the roof that covers the front entrance. The white mailbox is on the right side of the front door. There are two wide brick steps that lead to the landing in front of the door. A brick path starts from the driveway, which is on the left of the house, continues to the right, and then curves toward the front entrance. There is a beautiful, larger, deeper garden in front of the left side of the house and a smaller one in front of the right side. Both sides have two rows of plants. The back rows have taller shrubs than the front rows. Both sides have ornamental grasses and plants with pink flowers. There are two tall Evergreen bushes on each side of the house.

Jennifer enjoyed working on this House Painting. She thought it was a small, but sweet home. She painted branches and leaves that frame the top of the House Portrait. Those branches belong to a tree that is in front of the house. Jennifer reduced the area of shadows on the front lawn that were cast from a large tree in front. Instead of covering the entire lawn with shadows, her shadow comes in from the lower, right corner, on a diagonal that brings the viewer’s eye into the painting. She used the wet-on-wet watercolor technique to give the shadows a fuzzy look. The shape of the entire painting is straight on top, has large curves on the sides, and small circular lines on the bottom.