Text Box: Farmhouse 2008 Our friend, Leslie Shreve, commissioned this drawing as a wedding gift in late 2007. The wedding was to be held at a beautiful rustic farmhouse the next June and she thought a drawing of the house would be a perfect wedding gift. It would have been possible to go to the location to draw it but I’ve had some success lately with drawing from photos. I had done drawings from photos a long time ago but the pictures were small and not very detailed and I never felt good drawing like that. Now I can blow them up myself, project them through a 50 inch television and sit across the room from a life sized subject. I asked Leslie to supply me with a lot of photos of the place and, as soon as I had these, I was able to start. I had used a set of photos to make the base for my son Adam’s wedding invitations so I used what I learned doing that drawing to make this one. There was one major difference between the two drawings. I did Adam’s by sketching on paper what I was seeing on either the large television screen or the smaller computer screen. I started this one the same way but ended up printing blow ups of parts of the farmhouse. I would then take the blow ups and my pen and drawing pad down to the local Starbucks and work there. It gave me more of a feeling of being outside. The customers in Starbucks seem to go out of their way to ignore each other so I had all the privacy I needed. There is a tree right in front of the house. It probably is great in summer for shade on the porch but I moved another tree to the right foreground so I could show an unobstructed view of the house. When the drawing was finished I had tiles and coasters made from the drawing and presented Leslie with the complete package well ahead of the wedding date.

 Close Ups
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All material copyright 2009 Neil Borrell

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