No 104The Commission
From snapshot to sheet
The weeks inside a commission: pencil proof, corrections, ink, the wash, and how the finished sheet travels to the house it shows.
Set down by Merritt Voss · checked by Anne Pruitt · 582 words · about 3 min at the bench ·
Between the envelope of snapshots and the parcel on the doorstep, a house portrait passes through four stages, and the slowest of them is not the drawing. Knowing the sequence helps a client time a commission for a closing, a wedding or a Christmas, and it explains why the artist keeps asking questions after the photographs have already arrived.
The pencil proof
The first stage is the composition. The artist pencils the mass of the house onto the sheet: roof, walls, porch, the big shapes of tree and yard, all in the chosen format. This is the stage where the removal list is applied and the season is decided, and it is the last stage where moving a tree is free. Many artists send a photograph or a photocopy of the pencil to the client for approval, and the wise client looks at it longer than expected, because everything after this stage is ink.
Corrections at the proof are cheap and welcome. The porch should read deeper, the oak should come forward, the fence should go. A week of mailing pencil proofs back and forth is normal on a careful commission; the artist who will not show a pencil is asking the client to buy a surprise.
The ink
Once the proof is approved, the pen fixes it. The inking is the long quiet stage: the line work first, then the shade built up in cross-hatching, then the textures, brick, shingle, clapboard, foliage. Days pass without visible drama. A single 11 by 14 portrait carries tens of thousands of individual strokes, and the pace is the pace.
The wash and the wait
If the commission calls for color, the watercolor goes over the finished ink, thin enough that the line still carries the drawing. The wash adds a week, partly for the work and partly because paper must dry flat between stages. Then the sheet cures, is signed, and is checked once more against the instructions before it is packed.
The parcel
The finished portrait ships flat, never rolled: the sheet is taped to a stiff board, wrapped in clean paper, sandwiched in a second board and boxed. A tube is cheaper and ruins more drawings than rain does. Inside the parcel the client usually finds the sheet, a note on the paper it was drawn on, and sometimes the pencil, tucked in as a courtesy the artist is under no obligation to give.
The doors that close
Each stage ends in a small irreversible moment, and the client who knows them plans differently. Approval of the pencil is the first door: after it, composition is fixed and changes are paid for in eraser time. The inking is the second: once the pen is down, the removal list is history. The wash is the third, and the gentlest, since a color can be lifted or deepened only while the paper is still damp. The last door is the signature: after that the sheet is the portrait, and the only remaining corrections happen in a second commission.
The sheet, filed
A commission is a slow object in a fast market, and its calendar is part of its meaning. Snapshot, pencil, ink, wash, parcel: each stage has a door that closes behind it, and the client who knows the doors gets a better sheet for the same money. That closes the commission board; the next board turns from the order to the instrument and asks why the genre stays faithful to pen and ink.
