Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. 

Here is our dining room as pictured in the real estate photographs. Much lighter and brighter in this picture than in reality, but a pretty good representation.

Pretty neutral and not terrible. Just kinda...bland? Definitely not bad, just too neutral. Light grey below the chair rail and a cream above.  I knew I wanted to paint it, but I just wasn't sure what direction to go. We'll come back to that. 

Looking through to the breakfast room...

Not even a little neutral. Orange. Tangerine. Horrible. Awful. Repellent. Nothing was spared this color...not the trim...not the radiators...

The TV mount was removed in the "Great Removal of 2016" post-move-in. 

Because this isn't a hotel and we will not be mounting a television in any room of our house. The diagonal piece of wood across the windows also went away.

I like color. I can get behind white rooms when they're done right, but it will probably never be a principal look I go for simply because I really do love color. Not just for the sake of color, but because rooms with color seem to have more personality to me. I tend to steer clear of warm colors, though. I'm not a big fan of reds, oranges...I did use a brown in my old bedroom and I liked it, but overall, I gravitate toward cool colors. Blues in particular. 

I'm also usually pretty decisive about colors based on how they make me feel - many of the colors I used in our Goshen house gut punched me almost with how much I loved them. 

I want to view this Chase house as a fresh start, though. Not rely on colors I've used in the past, unless they just really work in a space. And for some reason, it's been really really hard for me to make up my mind about which direction to go! 

Now, the breakfast room is pretty small and gets a lot of light. I'm also thinking it may not be used as a breakfast room, but possibly rather a painting room. So while it could handle a dark color, I wanted something more reflective simply because I wanted to use the light.  

I happened upon the Farrow & Ball color Peignor (shown above in the picture with the white side table) and really loved it. It's almost pink, but also purple and very calming. But I can't justify paying almost $100/gallon, and unfortunately it was a color Sherwin Williams couldn't find a color match for, so I ended up picking a similarish color on the fly one day at SW, and I am very pleased with it. 

Just eye-balling it, it looks pretty darn close to Peignor. 

It's SW 6547 Silvery Peony. We also painted the trim SW Simply White. And that orange trim was very resistant to being painted over. It required at least 3 coats. Man.

And we have yet to tackle the radiator, because it's gonna require spray paint. Sometimes a room just wears you out and you need a break from it. That was Kyle's feeling after going after the trim repeatedly. Let's just come back to the radiator.

It's a vast improvement, don't you think?

A room you might actually want to spend time in.

Now, to the dining room. I have struggled SO hard to narrow down the colors I wanted. Here was my inspiration: 

They used a Farrow & Ball paint, and I think the two blues on top and bottom are the same color, but the top color is an emulsion.

I told you I really love blues. I LOVE these kind of blues. Rich, inviting, layered. Even the radiator is painted a blue. 

Let's not even talk about how much I want that blue velvet couch.

So, one reason I kept coming back to this particular room is that the wall has been divided into two different sections with the wainscoting, and yet, they maintained the flow of blue top and bottom. 

Our dining room has a chair rail, and I have never liked chair rails. They skew traditional, and while I love old houses, I'm not "traditional" in my design sense at all. I did NOT want to have this chair rail dictate my painting of the room and it seemed to totally be doing that.  

I couldn't figure out how to deal with it. I considered painting the top and bottom one color and the chair rail a different color...sort of like this...

But I just couldn't quite get there. I didn't love it. There was still a clear chair rail and it looked pretty traditional. So, I set aside the whole chair rail issue and just focused on colors. 

That was no easy task. I made so many trips to the paint store just to grab handfuls of swatches. And I labored over them. Kyle was puzzled by this, because I'm usually really decisive when it comes to picking colors.  I even toyed with the idea of removing the chair rail, but this house has its own ideas sometimes and I just knew that would end up being a supremely big mistake. Complicated. With the plaster walls, there's no telling what I might end up with. So I scrapped that thought.

I randomly chose a Sherwin William color, Silken Peacock and painted a swath on the dining room wall. It felt similar to the blue I liked so much in that blue room.

I lived with it for a few weeks and finally said, ok, let's do this.

I had also grabbed a second blue to pair on the bottom section and at the last minute, swapped it out for something else. Something funkier. SW Oceanside. It was a bit of an unexpected pairing, and that is what I wanted.

On went the top color (SW Silken Peacock) and it was beautiful. Instantly transformed the room.

We could have stopped there and that change would have been great, but nope. Onward we go.

The lighting in these pictures is terrible, but we did truly have to consider that the color would look dark as this room gets morning sun and some mid-day sun, but it's not a bright room. We were ok with that.

So, the first coat of the bottom color went on. It was a deeply pigmented color and would need about 3 coats to get it even, and at the time, we hadn't fully decided on how to handle the chair rails. 

We sampled painting the chair rail, but it was almost too hard to tell just with a little bit. And we were still uncertain about the bottom color. We liked it, but was it the look we wanted from the start? Kyle left it up to me. He knew I had this love affair going with that blue room... 

Somehow, I knew in my gut that these colors would work. 

It was a risk worth taking to just keep painting.

And paint we did.

It made our white trim look magnificent, and the color of the floors looked so rich!

Looking in from the kitchen.

Finally I just said, let's paint the chair rail. The bottom color. 

So we did.

Instantly, the room became exactly what we hoped for. Rich, jewel-toned, unexpected. Almost like the colors of ocean and sky meeting.

We have yet to put any artwork up, and I wish I had a lighter wood table.

But on the other hand, I love my table and am not going to sell it.

I am looking for a buffet or console table to store dishes in, so I may just find that in a lighter wood and let that add contrast to my dark woods.

My radiator is still white, for now. No immediate plans to change that.

We are all immensely pleased with the color pairing. SW Silken Peacock on top and SW Oceanside on bottom (covering the chair rail). Still need to remove the ginormous track lighting and figure out a better chandelier, but baby steps!!! I'm so happy to have two rooms painted that it makes me kind of giddy. These rooms have a long way to go yet, I know, but we're making progress.

This is my nephew, Gage. Isn't he a cutie? Just look at that face! 

As you know, this past fall, I took my first painting class - inspired to do so by the work of my painting hero, John Singer Sargent.

Looking back on the drawings and sketches that remain from my elementary, junior and high school years, it only seems natural that I gravitate to portraits because I have been drawing faces that long. 

I love faces. I love people's expressions, their individuality, the facets, shadows, gleams in eyes, quirks, ears, lips, drool...

And when I received Gage's birth announcement in the mail, I knew instantly that I had to paint that face. I loved the depth, the shadows, the quirked brows, the look of intensity, the drool on his chin, his expressive eyes. I knew it would be a challenge, but such a fun one! 

Just for funsies, before I started working on Gage's portrait, I decided to try out a different brush stroke style than I've used before - faster, sloppier, quick and messy, but using the same principals of building a face with cool and warm fleshtone colors. I was actually really pleased with the results. I may explore that more later on.

Phase one of painting for me is the sketch. I have used a projector before, but something in me would rather everything be by my hand. I'm not a purist TRULY in that sense, but if I can, I'd like to attempt to sketch what I see before I paint it. Here is one sketch. I ended up actually doing three. A small one in my ideas sketchbook, this one and then the one on the canvas.

To transfer the sketch to my canvas, I did something I've never done before - used a grid. It worked, although I ended up improvising slightly just because you don't always see things the same way every time you look at something. I kept seeing different things every time I looked at Gage's picture.

Here's a closer look at one section of the canvas sketched in.

Once I get the bug to paint, it consumes me. It's all I can think about or dream about and I forsake all else to paint. I'm sure this must be pretty normal among painters and artists.

So this painting began a few weeks ago, on a weekend when Kyle was stripping ivy from the front of our house and the kids were asleep. I sketched and did what I always do first: the eyes.

The second time I tackled this painting, it was the Monday following the Sunday I began it. And having begun the painting, it was haunting me. My beloved husband sensed an urgency in me and offered to clear the house for me that night.  He took the kids to the gym and then somewhere else, I don't remember where. I was just all in. I won't even tell you what time we ate dinner that night. 

But I will say I was thrilled when Kyle walked in to see what I'd accomplished and gasped with delight at what I had done so far. And I'll say this - it's the fastest I've ever painted. 

It took me almost 6 weeks of classes (3 hours per class) to do Brooklyn's painting. Half that for August and less for my tree painting, so I'm clearly getting better and faster. But this was surprisingly fast for me.

I am also currently painting with acrylics and so I was determined to not have to mix up multiple palettes of skintone if I could help it. That is so time-consuming. Not to mention that each batch is slightly different, so the more you touch up and change things, the more you have to touch up and change simply because you're working different colors into the painting. 

I stopped short of his mouth because that alone is a project. Mouths are so fun, but tricky. You have texture, depth, softness, moisture to convey...and in this case, a drip down his chin. As you can see above, that drip has yet to be painted in. 

Here's what my palette looks like when I paint: the left side is my cool colors and the right my warm.

Cool colors recede and the warm jump forward, making your painting 3 dimensional. No flat faces on my canvas.

I'm sure my skin tone palette will be different every time, but here's my basic recipe:

Cool palette

Cadmium Red Light (a little)

Raw Sienna (a lot)

Mix in some Raw Umber (this is your "cool" element)

and Titanium White to create the varying degrees of that tone.

Warm palette

Cadmium Red Light (a little)

Raw Sienna (a lot)

Titanium White mixed in varying degrees to create a progression of shades.

My Mother's Day present from Kyle and the kids was to absolutely leave me alone for as much of the day as possible to let me paint. Is there a better present? I think not.

I was able to paint unhindered for about 6-7 hours. Wow. Here is a zoomed out version of him all fleshed out! Even the drip! 

Hi, Gagey-Fred!

My camera was on a weird setting that showed every grain of my canvas, so this isn't a great representation of my picture, but oh well. You can see the mouth and its gleam and the drool!

More of the same.

Slightly different view.

I was very pleased with his nose. 

There are certainly things I think I could continually work on, but as my first painting instructor, Endia Gomez told me, there is a point at which you see the person you're painting and you stop. 

And I saw Gage and I was happy with him.

More of my favorite drool spot.

For me, oddly enough, the hardest part is picking a color for the background! I've been known to repaint backgrounds multiple times! 

I ended up going with a blackish blue. There is more blue than this picture conveys, but it's lost in the reflections. I liked the way it made him jump out from the canvas and how it matched his eyes. And my signature on his arm looks very much like a tattoo! 

Here they are: my first three portraits. Brooklyn was my first painting, August my second and Gage my third. 

I can see definite progressions on each and a comfort in my style and technique. I've also learned so much with each! I intend to take a portrait painting class this summer in which I will switch to oils. I think that will greatly enhance my painting style since oils mix so much differently and the drying time is NOTHING like with acrylics. 

So, here he is:

--Gage--

I hope you like him!