People paint houses they have left. That is the pattern in the custom orders we process: the family home before it was sold, the first flat, the grandparents' place in the village. The house someone currently lives in comes up far less often, and the dream house almost never, which is not what you would guess from the way this product is usually advertised.
Photographing a building for conversion
A house is easier than a face and harder than a landscape. The geometry has to be right or the painting looks wrong in a way nobody can name. Three rules cover it.
Stand far enough back that you are not tilting the camera upward. A tilted camera makes the walls lean inward, and the numbered regions will faithfully reproduce the lean. If the street is too narrow to step back, take the photograph from across the road at an angle rather than from directly in front.
Shoot in the hour before sunset. Midday light flattens a façade into a single tone and gives the tracing nothing to work with. Late light puts one wall in shadow and one in warm color, which is what makes a painted house look three dimensional.
Include the ground and some of the sky. A crop tight on the brickwork produces a canvas of rectangles. The tree at the gate, the gravel, the roofline against cloud: those are the regions that carry the picture.
Then upload it on the custom kit page. We trace the photograph into numbered regions, mix the acrylics to the colors in the image, and ship the canvas with brushes and a printed reference.
Which size and how many colors
Buildings have detail in them, so this is not the place for the smallest option. 16x20 inches at $24.95 is the working minimum, 20x26 at $29.95 if the house sits in a garden. On the 12x12 square at $19.95 the windows come out as three or four regions each and the result reads as a diagram.
Take 48 colors over 24 if the roof and the walls are close in tone, which is true of most brick and most stone. A 24 color version of a red brick house is a strong painting; a 24 color version of a pale rendered house is a pale rectangle.
Houses already painted
Not every order needs to be personal. Three canvases in the custom and portrait collection and around the catalogue carry the same feeling:
- Memories of Home. Warm windows, evening. The one people buy for someone who has moved away.
- Grandparents' House. Stone, shutters, strong afternoon shadow.
- The Verdant Home. A house half hidden by planting, and the greenest canvas of the three.
Lead time for a house that is about to be sold
Photograph it before the furniture goes and before the estate agent's board arrives. Processing takes one to three business days and delivery seven to fifteen, so a completion date four weeks out is enough time. Shipping is free to the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand. Custom kits that arrive damaged or misprinted are reprinted or refunded.
