House Portrait exhibition

Two more days to let me know about the swatch-swop!

Today is an exhibition of my little artist’s buildings as a wrap-up of the 2014 artwork by the girls. Here are the final surprise paintings for their mum and dad.

I love the way both little artists have interpreted their home as very large. You can see how they copied the windows, but also got a bit confused with the front door and steps leading up to it. The bricks were a lot of work. When you are very small and the sheet of paper is big it’s easy to put a window or door in the ‘wrong place’! The watercolours over the tea wash has given everything a lovely muted look – Isabel happily sponged the greenery with a sea-sponge but Hattie found the sponge ‘yukky’ and didn’t want to use it, so she used a brush. The white details were added in acrylic with a brush. I think both houses are very expressive and could easily illustrate a Charles Dicken’s story!

Here are their other masterpieces from this year.

This is their cousin’s house in Sweden. I had all four granddaughters doing these, but we left before Elva and Nomi finished theirs and I never got photos. 🙁 We sat in the apple orchard and the house was very high up (the camera flattens the depth) and they put the apple trees into the foreground – and painted the apples with their fingers. Hattie’s picture is on the left and you can see the steps down into the orchard and the washing line which was actually more where Isabel placed it – level with the house. Isabel’s trees were very accurately shown. They all started their artworks up at the house on the verandah, with wet paper and watercolour washes of mostly green with blue at the top. Clouds were ‘lifted’ out. Then we went down to the orchard with towels to sit on and waterproof felt-tips (Sharpies) to do the drawing. Trees were drawn with walnut ink and dip pens, then painted with water – which releases the ink. The house was done in white oil pastel over the watercolour sky.