art | New painting begun: Snowy Church

Started a new project today, a snowy church with trees around:

Project Start: 2012-11-14

Other people in the class had been working on this piece a few weeks back, when I was working on the waterfall. I finally decided to put that aside and work on something else.

I decided to forgo looking at the source photo at all, and do this entirely from my own thoughts and feelings. I sketched up the basic shapes of the church, steeple, windows, ground line and trees without any guides, save the 3x3 matrix. (I still need to get those lines erased.)

The instructor said to start with painting in a graduated wash of raw sienna starting from the ground line and going up, lightest part on the top of the page. I didn't have raw sienna, so I used quin gold instead, which I am particularly happy with. I wish I had gotten a picture of it while just the gold wash was on it, but sadly, my phone was dead.

The next was to put a blue wash from the top down. I used french ultramarine tempered with a bit of cerulean blue. I tried to wait until the previous wash was completely dry, including running a hot blow drier over it, but I think the paper still had a tiny bit of moisture in it, since the sky wash didn't come out as neatly as I'd like.

While the sky was wet, I started to paint in the background trees. Unfortunately, the sky wash dried rather quickly and so I didn't get the bleeding I wanted all around.

(Cross-posted from a snowy church with trees around)