Green bungalow in autumn

I was excited about this one from the first email. It was one of my first formal larger commissions, and it came from a family just a few streets from me, with a to-do list that made it interesting: the house in the photos was about to change, and they wanted it painted the way it was going to be, not the way it sat that day.

The house is a 1930 craftsman, and it is their first home — they bought it about a year before they wrote to me and have been slowly making it their own, restoring some of the historic features as they go. That is a good kind of client to paint for. They notice things.

I worked from photographs, and the house in them was mid-change. The windows had red trim, and the front steps and walkway were stone. Both were about to go — the family were repainting the trim and replacing the stone with brick — so I painted the house as it was going to be rather than as it sat the day the photos were taken.

The shrubs in the photos were the old ones. The hydrangeas had only just gone in and had not fully bloomed, but the family wanted to see them the way they will look once they fill in, so I let them peak a little — fuller and more open than they were on the day I painted them.

The tree out front was the first thing they mentioned. They love it in autumn, so I put it in with fall color and a few leaves down on the lawn. That framing — a tree leaning over the house, foliage filling the background — is where I started, and it is still what you will see in a lot of my paintings. I work in more than one way; this is the oldest of them.

I had never painted animals before this. They asked whether the dog and the cat could be in it, and I said yes before I was certain I could pull it off. In the end I kept them loose and gestural, sitting by the door. They read as the pets they are, and I did not have to make them perfect.

The wind chime by the porch steps stayed because it was a gift from a great aunt who lived here in Indy. Things like that are the whole point of a painting like this.

I included a card with this one mostly to learn the process. My first attempt was simply to shrink the painting to card size, and the print came back wrong: the textured white edge of the paper showed through around it and made the whole thing look cheap, and once the house was that small the pen lines went squiggly and the corners jagged. So I learned to crop that border out without touching the color inside the painting, and to shrink it the right way rather than just making the numbers smaller. It is a fussy amount of work for a small extra. Worth it, though — done properly, the card looks like the painting rather than a poor copy of it. They make a good personal touch, too — stationery for a letter, or a card to send to someone.

I carried it four blocks to their door by hand. Watching someone take a painting of their own house into their own hallway is the part of this job I did not expect to like so much.