"Fairytale Home" - From Concept to Final Painting

"Fairytale Home". A peaceful place at the edge of the woods.

Early Sketches

My aim was to create a house in a magical forest with oversized trees and beautiful nature. The house would be large yet still small compared to the environment. Smoke would be floating out of the chimney and also the forest shall feel full of life. It's a quite cartoony style. All in all it makes the impression of a fairytale home such as the house of the seven dwarves in Snow White. 

After several concepts and designs of the house in the woods I came across an image of an abandoned old French Château (manor house/house of nobility) which inspired me to come up with the final design one can see beneath.

Above is a small interior sketch. The staging/placing of objects does not make much sense though.

Painting Process

From sketch to value sketch to coloured painting to night version.

I started off with the pencil sketch of the Château and imported it into photoshop.

Now I started blocking in value in a separate layer which I set to "multiply" to not loose too much detail of the sketch.

After finalising the values in greyscale I added colour by selecting a new layer and setting it to "color". First I would create a general colour scheme for the painting and first afterwards go in to more detail such as adding highlights and other details.

I then changed the treetops colour and the top picture area to a more reddish tint. This helped the overall composition in my opinion. It is now more comfortable to view. The building distinguishes itself through colour and value contrast from the background and the lighting further guides the viewer's attention to the centre of the painting.

Day Version

For the night version I lowered the colour contrast and added lighting from the windows and some sparks/particles in the smoke of the chimney afterwards. The orange and blue are contemporary colours which lets the windows stand out despite their low intensity and value.

Night Version