A House Portrait from Springfield, New Jersey

by Jennifer Skopp

Jennifer Skopp first started getting interested in creating Watercolor House Portraits during the COVID lock-down period. She was first experimenting with collage and then had the idea to do a painting of her own house. She stood across the street from her home and took some photographs.

This Springfield, New Jersey house is a split-level that was built in 1958. It has white siding and medium greenish-blue shutters. The house is very wide. The middle section of the house on the top level has two sets of double windows.

Below that section is the front door, a single window, a double window, and a large window with two very small windows on each side of it. The garage has a white door and is attached to the right side of the house. The left side of the house has a large window with two double windows attached. That section is taller than the bottom section of the house, but shorter than the center part of the house that has a pitched roof.

The walkway to the house comes from the sidewalk and is straight. Then it makes a left turn, then a right that leads to the front entrance.

There is a garden with various shrubs including two ornamental grasses, a tall, thin evergreen and a pom-pom bush. Jennifer painted flowers in a pattern of green and pink that border the walkway. She painted a shadow of a tree on the asphalt driveway using the watercolor technique of wet-on-wet.

The top part of the House Painting, which is the sky, has an irregular border. The tall trees behind this house are painted using short brushstrokes with different shades of green and highlighted with a light yellow.

This was the first Watercolor House Portrait that Jennifer ever painted.