Drawing homes: A touch of red ♥️ (Step-by-step guide - Week 17) (Patreon)

Hi everyone!! 🤗

For this week, we’re focusing on how adding a specific color can make your little homes stand out. We’ll be working with red accents and exploring how this color can bring warmth and focus to an illustration!

I created two illustrations for this week: one with a red rooftop and one where the entire house is red. It’s a fun way to see how color choices can change the overall feeling of your drawing.

You’ll find my step-by-step process, base layers, and final illustration below, together with the materials I used 🥰

Tips for using color in your illustrations

Start by choosing one main color to focus on. This helps keep your illustration simple and clear. So in this case we chose houses with red details, so that will be the main color of our illustrations. Here are some tips:

Start with one main color and keep the rest simple.

Use color to draw attention to the house.

Keep the surrounding colors softer so your main color stands out.

Red rooftop

I used the following Tombow brush pens as a base layer:

Tombow 126 (Light olive)

Tombow 133 (Chartreuse, Light Green)

Tombow 772 (Dusty rose)

Ecoline 374 (Pink Beige)

As you can see I forgot to leave white spaces for the chimneys... Happily we can add this later with our white gelpen! (Reminder that everyone makes mistakes 🙊)

For the second layer, I used the following Faber-Castell Pencils:

Faber-Castell 278 (Chrome Oxide Green)

Faber-Castell 283 (Burnt Siena)

Faber-Castell 217 (Middle Cadmium red)

Faber-Castell 157 (Dark Indigo)

I added Tombow N89 (Warm Grey) later to the side of the house to give it more depth!

Full red home

After studying the smaller details from the reference, I brought everything together into a full illustration of the house and its surroundings. I started with the basic shape of the home and then slowly added the elements we practiced, to build up the scene step by step.

I used the following Tombow brush pens as a base layer:

Tombow 126 (Light olive)

Tombow 133 (Chartreuse, Light green)

Tombow 772 (Dusty rose)

Tombow 553 (Mist Purple)

For the second layer, I used the following Faber-Castell Pencils:

Faber-Castell 157 (Dark Indigo)

Faber-Castell 278 (Chrome Oxide Green)

Faber-Castell 217 (Middle Cadmium red)

I wish you all lots of fun with this week's reference, and don't hesitate to ask me any questions or show your illustrations in the group chat 🤗

Celyn 🌸