Illustrating the Bloomfield Hills Home Hiding Behind All Those Trees

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to illustrate a house you can barely see, let me introduce you to this Bloomfield Hills commission. The home sits in one of those prestigious gated communities where the landscaping budget is unlimited, which is great for curb appeal and less great when your artist is squinting at a dozen different iPhone angles just trying to figure out where the front door actually is.

There’s an island of shrubs (which the client and I decided would be a bit too much to include), then another layer of shrubs, flowers and several full-grown trees just hanging out in front of the façade. My client did her best—truly!—but getting one clean reference photo was basically impossible. So I played architectural detective, stitching together every angle, every hedge, every “I think this is the left window?” clue until the house finally made sense.

And then came the brickwork. Oh, the brickwork. The house? Bricked. The sweeping U-shaped driveway? Also bricked. All of it hand-drawn, brick by brick, in a pattern that probably took a few years off my life but looks fantastic, so we’ll call it even.

There’s something special about turning an impossible-to-photograph home into a watercolor painting that lets the house shine through the jungle. And this one shines.

Learn how to commission a hand-painted watercolor house portrait ➜