Guadi for the Holidays

India ink and watercolor on Bristol board

Have I mentioned that I love the architect Guadi's work? And that when I get to Europe, the only place in Spain I want to go is Barcelona to look at the buildings that he designed? One of his buildings, a church, is still under construction... an over 100 year old project. It is gorgeous, wild and fantastical.

After Kurbisshaus, that I posted earlier I wanted to make more houses. I've been drawing and redrawing and burning through erasers like crazy. There was something that wouldn't work about it. And no matter what I did it didn't work until I took a day off and decided on a plan.

Instead of cramming a bunch of halloween motifs into one house, I decided that each house should have a theme. And this one, because I fell in love with my spiderweb stainded glass windows, would be just the spiderwebs. The gourd suggested a Guadi influence when I got to the top and put a 70's styled bump out. After cruising through some pumpkins on Google the turban squash seemed the best topper which then suggested the entry way. In keeping with the theme the grille is either a web or a spider with a problem; stuck in his own creation.

As with the other one, this is watercolor on Bristol board. It does not have Radiant pearls... yet. Instead, I used another technique to add interest. Liquid masking is a wonderful tool. When you have your drawing rendered you can use a pen or a paint brush to apply the liquid to areas that you want to remain white. When dry you can paint right over the top of it. The mask resists the pigments. The result is rather stunning. Just look at the next photo.

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The red mushroomy poof is washed in three or four shades of red over the liquid mask. Here the mask is removed. You can see the white is pure. Could you imagine how hard it would be to have to paint around all those shapes? And the horrible thing about having to work that way is that it leaves ring marks instead of the smoothness of a wash. I had shaken the liquid mask so that I got bubbles and was hoping that the micro dots would have left tiny little dots of color inside the white marks. But alas... I didn't get them.

The only problem that I have now that it is mostly colored the way that I want it is how to landscape this one. I could do the whole curly tree thing. But I don't really want to lock myself into a pattern. Then again a forest of oak trees is going to be a bit redundant. Still....

Oh and when it comes to scale, I screwed up and the house takes up the whole page. So there is not a lot of room for landscaping. And this is most likely not going to be the last version of this one. I really enjoy this house. I said to a co-worker today that I would live in a house like this.