Bear Lake House

My Grandma Wilde grew up in Garden City, Utah. Her childhood home is right on the main drag at Bear Lake, right next door to The Pickleville Playhouse. Almost everyone who has visited Bear Lake has seen this house. It is quite a house. Originally it was a grain silo. It has had many additions over the years and the staircase has a lot of character. No step has the same width. The third step from the bottom is extremely slim. The carpet can be a little slippery and many a visitor has slipped down the stairs, crashing and causing the entire house to shake. I could tell so many stories---perhaps another time.

I took a photo from this angle a few years ago. It's different from every other photo taken of this house from straight on. I've talked about doing a project with this house forever. First I thought I would do a colored pencil rendering on mat board. It was one of my favorite mediums way back when. My first excuse being that I needed new colored pencils. My set mysteriously got depleted when DD used them for projects at MUD a few years ago. I got new colored pencils. My second excuse was I had no mat board to work on. So, since I've been trying to paint more (I still have unfinished paintings I'm getting up the motivation to  complete) I decided to try a watercolor.

The artist is always the severest critic of their own work. I'm not too happy with the results. I know better than to use white paint. It is too opaque and changes the properties of the paper. The house is very white in real life and leaving the paper to be the color of the house wasn't an option since the paper is very ivory. I thought at one point I had ruined the whole thing, but was able to sort of salvage it. The painting might get matted and framed. I'll have to see what the family consensus is this weekend.

As is pretty typical with me---if there is anything I really like about a painting I do it is usually some small part. And oddly enough it is almost always a tree. I love trees. So here is the part I like best.

Grandma Wilde's birthday is next week. I'm not sure if she'll get this as a present or not yet. She's my grandma, so of course she will love it. I just don't know if I want her hanging it in her house for everyone to see. It will still be a surprise if no one tells her about it. And since she doesn't blog I'm pretty sure my secret is safe until the big day. Shhh!