Two photographs became one image

This project started from two completely different photographs.

The first was of the small house in my backyard, built in the 1930s as the original house on the property before the main house was constructed. It is used as a shed now, but it still has a particular quality at night that I wanted to capture.

The second image happened accidentally. I was trying to photograph the moon through the window of a moving car after Fourth of July fireworks, but the motion blurred everything together. Instead of a clear moon, the camera captured light and atmosphere that felt more like memory than documentation.

Even though the photographs had nothing to do with each other originally, they immediately felt connected. The house became the structure of the image, and the hazy moon became its atmosphere.

Ink wash moves quickly. Once the diluted ink touches the paper, there is very little room to correct it. The image has to be understood before it is painted.

I started with a small sketch and grayscale thumbnail study to work through the composition and values before moving to the final piece. The challenge was balancing the weight of the dark sky against the house itself while leaving enough untouched paper for the windows to glow against the black ink.

The more I worked on it, the less the image felt like documentation of a place and the more it felt like a memory of one.

What interested me was the shift in atmosphere. During the day, the house feels ordinary. At night, with the moon overhead and the windows glowing, it starts to feel suspended somewhere between comforting and unsettling.

The final ink wash was accepted into the Dennos Museum’s Juried Student Art Show.

Seeing the piece installed changed the scale of it for me. What had started as reference photos, sketches, and ink studies became something physical and public, existing outside the assignment it originally came from.

After finishing the ink wash, I wanted to see how the same image could shift tone without changing its structure.

The initial thumbnail inkwash became the basis for a spooky version of the card, while the final inkwash illustration became a winter holiday version. Even though both came from the same image, the typography, color, and atmosphere changed the emotional reading of the piece completely.

What interested me most was how little actually had to change. The same house could feel quiet, unsettling, nostalgic, or warm depending on how the surrounding design framed it.