Here are two Victorian house portraits by John Berkey (1932-2008). They're notable not only for the disciplined color gamuts, but also for a particular way of painting with opaque paints which works really well for architecture, hardware, spacecraft, and products.
(Click on the image to see them full-frame) It's really quite similar to the way Canaletto painted, except Berkey was using casein instead of oil. Gouache is perfect for this sort of method. Acrylic usually isn't opaque enough. The method involves doing a careful preliminary drawing, but then being willing to lose parts of your drawing under the paint. Canaletto would scribe lines into the canvas so that he could find his placement lines again.
Start with large brushes at the outset, especially flats. Each edge is cut over background areas, coming forward from the background to the front wall, and then forward again from the front wall to the window bays. Small details like clapboards come last.
For each window, you would paint first the room color, then the curtain, then the shade, then the framing. Each area is painted past the guidelines, so that when you cut edges, they are always clean.
Beginning painters tend to be afraid of painting over the lines of their underdrawing, but once you get rid of the fear, painting becomes a lot more fun. You can always find details, and correct them, in the paint. In Berkey's case, he often started with little more than a few quick perspective lines, and found the whole painting in the paint.
For this kind of painting, you also need to have a mahl stick or straight edge or bridge that floats at an even height over the painting surface. There are various ways to do that, so that's a good subject for a future post.
Previous GJ posts on John Berkey
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