A male House Finch on my back deck having lunch

I am honing my birding skills by making pictures of birds feeding on our back deck. Eventually I will introduce some natural surroundings to capture these little guys on tree branches. In the mean time, I thought some of the painters out there would like to take a crack at painting this beautiful little House Finch. If you do paint or draw him, send me a picture and I will display them in this post! I hope you all are having a great Sunday.

Lee

Here are the paintings I have received of our little bird!

My November Painting Challenge Submission

Ahhhh, a holiday weekend with plenty of time to paint. Well, here it is – my November painting challenge submission of Château d’Azay-le-Rideau. Although I started with a pretty tight drawing, I tried to keep my brushstrokes loose. I struggled a bit with the reflection but generally like how it turned out.  OK, I will admit, this was a tough challenge. It seems so easy when I put up a photo. Painting it, however, is an entirely different proposition! Below is a detail shot of the brushstrokes.

November painting challenge detail photo

11x14 inch sketch of Azay le Rideau on Gessobord

Here the sketch I will use to paint Azay le Rideau for the November ADNW challenge. To make the sketch, I first drew a 1-inch grid overlay on top of the reference photo using Photoshop. To keep things simple, I printed the gridded photo at actual size, which is 11 x 14. I then drew a 1-inch grid on my 11 x 14 Gessobord ground using a ruler and small T-square. At that point, all I had to do was sketch the chateau to the Gessobord using the 1-inch gridded photo as my reference. As long as I drew the correct lines in the right box, my sketch would be drawn in the right proportions and perspective. Once I finished sketching, I used a kneaded eraser to erase as much of the grid from the Gessobord as possible. Before moving forward, I must spray the surface with a workable fixative so I don’t wipe away my sketch when I start to paint!

Gridded printout reference for Azay le Rideau sketch

When I start painting, I plan to first tone the Gessobord with a very pale yellow. The pale yellow will serve as my brightest lights, which is where the sun is the most intense on the chateau in the photo. The transparency of the toning combined with the white primer should allow the lights to reflect back and pop against the progressively darker areas as I paint them in. We shall see!

A virtually built house in SoftPlan residential design software

The American Dream

I have met many people that have dreamed about building their own home. I have always had a fascination with building things and I too had a life goal of building our own house. And when I say build, I mean purchase the lot, design the floor plan, and be the general contractor and occasional hammer swinger. In essence, take all the risk and the ultimate satisfaction.

Although going into every detail will be impossible in this blog, I will attempt in this series to give you an idea of the process and steps that I took to build our home. It would have been immensely helpful to me at the time so I hope that others can benefit from my experience. I am not sure how many posts it will take to complete this series but I will expand it as time permits.

If you are not into home building and just like travel, art and photography, don’t worry because I will keep up with those posts too!

Our Situation

Donna and I have owned three houses so far in our life. We outgrew our first place pretty fast in two and a half years, which was about when our son arrived! On the opposite end of the spectrum, we called our second house a home for 16 years. It was a great place and I did a ton of remodeling on that house including finishing a basement and building a two car garage, which allowed me to turn my existing garage into an ultimate wood shop. With the experience I gained on that place, in addition to some mentoring from a local custom home builder, we decided to finally build our own house when our son graduated from high school.

Before we get too far, the house you see in the first four renderings in this post is not the house we ultimately built. They were the initial concepts that lead to the final design. You will see the actual house we built for ourselves as we go through the project in detail. The two renderings at the bottom are of Donna’s mom’s house, which which we built before starting our own place.

The first concept drawing of the Brown residence

Where Did I Start?

I have  found in life that if you focus too heavily on the enormity of a task and all the barriers that can get in the way of achieving your goal, it is easy to get discouraged and never take the plunge. They say you should eat an elephant one bite at a time. That is what I did.

Full color rendering from my concept house drawn in SoftPlan

I decided that the best way to learn how to build a house was to build one. Build one in the computer that is. The software that is available these days is amazing. After a ton of research, I purchased a residential design software package called SoftPlan. It was a big investment at $3600 but that was a lot cheaper than buying materials for a real house. SoftPlan allowed me to design and build a virtual house right down to the inch using virtual materials just like the ones that I would use to build in real life.

Rear of house rendering including lot grade and retaining walls

The renderings you see above were generated from computer-aided, two-dimensional floor plans, that I drew in SoftPlan. You know, like the ones you see rolled up on the job site that contain the site plan, framing details, foundation design, and elevations – just computerized versions of them. The two-dimensional floor plan drawings contained all of the relevant information to create the 3D models that you see in the pictures. For example, when I drew an exterior wall, the computer knew, by my specification, that the wall was made of 2×6 lumber, was 12-feet high, had 1/2 inch drywall on the inside, and sheathing and stucco on the outside. Sweet!

Below is the place we built for Donna’s mom. I have included a copy of the floorplan I drew in SoftPlan for her house along with the visualization so you can  see how a 2D plan extrudes into the 3D version. The 2D version is drawn to actual construction requirements so the 3D model is incredibly accurate. Within SoftPlan, I can actually walk through the house and check it out.

Our mom's 2D-floorplan

A 3D explosion of Mom's house from 2D plan

So, in essence, I was able to design the floor plan with CAD-like accuracy but also see what I was designing in full 3D. Pretty slick, huh? Yes, the software had a huge learning curve but that was part of the fun. I my view, this was an excellent way to get comfortable with what the house would look like and working out the design bugs before committing to the build. Nothing worse that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and decide you just made an ugly and functionally compromised house!

Yes, this task is not for everyone but it was a blast to learn this way. Using an architect is advisable if you do not have any experience. Or even if you do for that matter. I fortunately had the benefit of being mentored by a custom home builder that gave me the benefit of his experience. After I drew my house, I gave the plans to a structural engineer for review. They ultimately stamped the final plans, which were submitted to the local building department for final approval and the issuance of a building permit.

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Château de Chambord

I am planning to start selling my work in nicely made museum quality frames. To test possibilities, I thought I would first visualize a series of framed French Chateau images processed in sepia. To me these images work well with an aged photo technique because the structures themselves are about 400 to 500 years old. Wanting a frame that complements the images, I built virtual prototypes in Photoshop from a photo of a frame that adorns an oil painting in my collection. They would be somewhat pricy to have made, but I like the way the gold leaf liner sets off the image and how the wood provides richness to the overall impression of the scene. Now to meet with the frame maker and get them built!

Château Azay-le-Rideau

Château de Cheverny

Château Azay-le-Rideau

Boathouse in the Loire Valley

What could be more perfect than a boat tied to a quaint little boathouse with flowers everywhere and no swing set in the back yard? The beautiful scene above is one we ran across while visiting Chateau Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire Valley. As I crossed the bridge, I was instantly drawn to the near perfect composition of elements. If you are attracted to a scene, there is probably a good reason. I highly recommend you stop for a second to try and figure out why. Once you do, the trick is to get the camera to see it the same way you do.

Along these lines, the original color photo (shown below) is almost too much. Although beautiful, the camera sees everything in the scene with the same intensity, which makes it a little overwhelming. It is like getting whacked over the head with a color sledgehammer. So, because I was originally attracted to the boathouse, I processed the photo in a way that would draw the most attention to it.

The original photograph

First, let’s address cropping. In my view, the boathouse fits nicely in the left third of the photograph. If you are not familiar with the Golden Ratio, you can read a quick primer that I wrote a while back HERE that my help. It is basically the rule of thirds with a little math thrown in for good measure. In addition to being able to position the subject near a third, it’s also nice that there are a number of converging lines that also draw our eyes to the subject.

After cropping with the concepts above in mind, I ran a black and white conversion on the photo with an Adobe Photoshop plugin called Silver Efex Pro. After the conversion was done, with a click of a button, I ended up with a new black and white layer on top of the original full color layer containing the original photo.

Showing the layers and painting with mask to bring back color

At that point, I used a layer mask in Photoshop (shown above) that allowed me to “paint” in the color from the layer below. The black/dark areas in the mask layer in the upper right of the layer palette are where the color is being let through from the photo below. Looks complicated but it really isn’t.

In much the same way I paint, I tried to focus the most color and detail around the subject. If you look at the final image at the top, the flowers are more saturated the more you move toward the boathouse. Also, the vignette mutes some of the peripheral detail so we can focus more easily on the subject. Photos like this can be processed a million different ways and it is great fun to experiment to try and achieve your artistic vision. Give it a go!

I just had to give this one a go. It has been a while since I have had the pencils out and it was fun to finally sit down and draw again. I think I will try another when I have time and just focus on her face. This drawing is about 10 inches high and I found it difficult to work the right amount of detail into the the piece.  Thanks to those that are submitting work for this month’s challenge. It is always a joy to see your work!

Lonely brushes this month

It will be back! Sorry no picture  to paint this month. Between work and getting ready to head to France, it has been tough to find the time to set the challenge up the challenge for August. Rest assured that it will be back the third week of September. You will have until the end of October to complete your submission. The subject? Well France of course. Provence to be specific. We will be staying in Paris, the Loire Valley, Avignon, the hilltop town of Roussillon, and Nice. If I can’t take a compelling picture in one of those places to paint, I’ll give up! Van Gogh liked the area so I suspect you will too.

Thanks to all that have participated in the past. It is such a joy to see your work and I look forward to seeing more in the months to come!

When does old become beautiful?

I have had my eye on this old house for a while. I am not sure who owns it or anything about its life but I always glance at it when I drive by. This place sits on a ranch about five minutes from my house a ways back from the roadside fence. I found it particularly beautiful yesterday now that the cottonwoods are beginning to burst with a gorgeous spring green. The scrub oak has not sprung yet and I think it adds a nice area of interest below the ponderosa trees as well.

This photo was made from a single handheld shot with my Canon DSLR and a 100-400mm lens. As I said, the house is in the distance so the only way to make this shot work is to bring it closer with a long lens. Once downloaded, I applied a little sharpening and did a bit of dodging and burning to accentuate the elements I found most interesting. As if I was painting on canvas, I wanted to make the house the focal point so that is where I applied the most detail, focus and contrast. I also added a bit of glow to the grasses up against the house to amplify the feeling of the sunlight in the scene. To complete the treatment, I used the Topaz Simplify plugin to create a simplified layer and then used layer masking to bring back the detail I wanted.

This process as a blend of photography and digital painting. For me, it adds an incredibly interesting new dimension to my photography and fine art pursuits. Give it a go!