This is the first installment of the Meet Virginia Series. This is the Hofauger House located at Explore Park in Roanoke, Virginia.
The house was built in 1837 by Samuel and Elizabeth Hofauger, at the intersection of Ogden Road and Colonial Avenue in Roanoke County. Samuel and Elizabeth Hofauger and their four children were of German and English descent. Their largest crop was corn, which was used to feed the farm animals and the family. It was also processed into corn meal. The Hofauger house represents a middle-class farm family in the mid-19th century.
The house is now at Explore Park and was one of the first historical structures reconstructed and played a role in changing the area into a living history museum.
In the summer of 2019, we camped at Explore park and I walked the area taking a ton of pictures of all of the structures to use in a wood-burning series.
I created a pattern from the original photo above and started to burn. The next three pictures show a little bit of the progression of this piece. I used my small wood-burning tip for 90% of this pyrography piece and used the shader to darken some of the wood and shadow areas.
The challenge was that the background swallowed the house a bit when I was finished as you can see in the next picture. The background looks lighter in the picture than on the wood-burning piece. I could have just left the house on its own but that would have left it bare or recreated the farm.
After a little bit of pondering I decided to add some green to indicate the trees and grass. I like that I added the greenery from the trees and the bit of grass to reflect my original photograph.
