House Painting Tutorial

Here's the promised tutorial on how to paint decorative houses for your wall. It's really pretty easy...think paint-by-number.

First, you need a picture of the home you want to paint and something to paint on. My friend that taught me painted on wooden bowls. I chose to use a wooden plaque I found at Michaels. You could use just about anything. Here's our home in Connecticut and the wooden plaque (I painted the border):


You'll need this picture to be the size you would like it to be on your wall. You'll also need two copies of the picture (one to cut up, one to use as a reference). I think it's easiest to use pictures that are saved on the computer because then you can paste them into a word processing program and adjust the size until it's what you want.
I start out by painting the sky. Then, when you have your picture sized just right, you're going to cut out the outline of the house and trace it on the wood like so:




Next, I like to cut out the roof and trace it on the wood:

Then, just keep cutting away at the picture and tracing as if you're creating a puzzle. For this house, I next cut out the gutters and garage, then windows, etc. After you finish with the house, you can do the same technique with the yard.

Now you continue painting. I used acrylic paints and started with the lighter areas first. I don't know that it matters a whole lot if you start with light colors, because acrylic paints cover each other up well if you make a mistake (you can cover dark colors with a few coats of light colors and the dark doesn't show through). Here are pictures of what this painting process looks like both with the Connecticut house and the Georgia house:



You can see that you don't have to be very exact. You'll be touching things up later anyway. Keep painting until you've finished each area and then do some outlining with a black sharpie marker. For the window panes, I used a toothpick and white paint or a white paint-pen. Add details such as flowers, clouds, etc. Last, I like to write our address somewhere on the picture, the date we moved in, and who was born there. To protect the creation, finish by coating the project with modge podge.

As a side note, take creative liberties (this is art after all). For instance, the flowering bush along the driveway is not in the photograph of the Connecticut house, but we did have a flowering bush along the driveway. Also, with our Wymount apartment, I'm going to paint Y Mountain in the background even though you couldn't see it from our apartment. I'll post my finished creations when I finish with the Wymount painting. Have fun creating!