Folk Tale Landscapes – House in the woods (#7)

Here’s the next video from my landscape sketching series about folk tale landscapes.

There is something incredibly eerie and unsettling about solitary houses in the woods. Even as someone who grew up in a small mountain town in the midst of a lot of weird buildings, I always found it a bit creepy to pass by those houses that were built a bit further away from the village itself. Even if you could see that someone lived in the house or if it actually was a group of well-kept buildings it always seemed obvious to me that the people were part of the forest – a shadow-world with deep secrets and old stories where anything could happen. It didn’t matter much that at times I had classmates who lived in such remote areas, or when I later found out that some of these buildings were maintenance buildings for the water company – the feeling remained.

I immediately felt the same uneasiness and strange joy when I came across the group of houses that’s the subject of today’s folk tale landscape sketch. On a dark, rainy day last fall this immediately activated my imagination – there were no parked cars, no people, but a nice arrangement of derelict seeming buildings and shacks, and a half-wilderness of a garden in front. In fact, the path we were coming from brought the houses into view so that they seemed to loom in front and slightly above us – a perfect angle.

I spent quite a lot of time on the various shapes of the buildings – how the roofs and angles are arranged. It’s important to get these right for a convincing architecture sketch. The lighting in this scene is rather flat, so nothing really interesting happening here, just a dark, moody atmosphere waiting to emerge. I find the bright yellow foliage an interesting counterpoint to the rest of the scene. For the finishing touches I used a rigger brush with white gouache – great for details and thin long lines.

This was a fun sketch to do and a welcome change of pace, I really enjoy sketching architecture from time to time.

I hope you’ll like the video:

Folk Tale Landscapes – House in the woods (#7) (video)

A bit of background info: In this series, I’m looking for landscapes that could be the background for local legends and folk tales. I’m not looking to illustrate any of the stories themselves, I’m just interested in the mood and atmosphere behind these stories and I’m looking for ways to transport this in a landscape sketch.

For more info about this painting series (and about my background), read on here and here. I started researching and creating these paintings last year (2020) and the project still continuing as I’m exploring new interesting places. Current restrictions have slowed the process a bit, but I like the thought of having an ongoing project in the back of my mind.