Home for Christmas ~ Painting miniatures!
Most people long to be home for Christmas. Home is usually a place where you feel most comfortable and relaxed. If you have too much eggnog you don’t have to drive home. You can come down in your PJs in the morning. You don’t have to put your dog in the kennel and be somewhere you don’t want to be. That is why there are so many Christmas songs with verses like “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”
People who move often and have had many homes over the years can get nostalgic around Christmas time about the homes they’ve lived in. I quite often get requests to paint a painting of people’s homes, sometimes as a surprise Christmas present.
I have a collector that has lived in many beautiful homes over the years. A few years back he had me paint a small 5” x 7” painting of their family home as a surprise Christmas present for his wife. He thought it would be nice to have on a shelf in their home to be a reminder of all their many wonderful memories.
This Christmas he added to their collection of miniature paintings by commissioning two more 5” x 7” paintings of other homes that they had lived in.
I painted the 5”x 7”s on thick birch-board, in oil. I had to break out the tiniest of brushes in order to get in the most amount of detail possible.
Both paintings are of brick homes. The first home’s brickwork really stands out because it has an off-white mortar that makes the red bricks pop. It was important to define all of the bricks in order to capture the charm of the home, which meant painting every little brick!
The second home had a darker mortar and the brickwork was more blended, which allowed me to give the impression of brickwork and not have to paint every brick. However, the brickwork had a pattern and some fancy moulding and trim.
It’s kind of funny, people often ask me how long does a painting take me to paint. I always respond that it depends upon the size of the painting and the amount of detail. Sometimes the paintings are large and don’t have a lot of detail. Sometimes they are large and have a lot of detail. Some paintings are small without much detail and some are small with a lot of detail. So the amount of time a painting takes often varies greatly.
I must say it was enjoyable to work on such a small scale, since I don’t do it often. In college I had an art teacher that had us go from painting a 4 inch by 6 inch painting to a 6 foot by 8 foot ink drawing! It was a great lesson in scale and how size does matter.
These two miniature doorway paintings arrived just in time for Christmas and are now on display in their beautiful home. It was an honor to paint something so meaningful to them.
I hope you enjoyed seeing these paintings and reading the backstory. Thank you for your interest in my work. I also just finished a Great Blue Heron commission and a floral still-life commission.
I’ll be back working on my Lasting Impressions of Charleston series of paintings in the next few weeks! I hope everyone has a Happy New Year!!!
“One of the joys of being an artist is having the freedom to follow my passion….”
What’s next?
Drawing by William R. Beebe