St. Mary The Virgin Church, Newington

Here we go. Number five in a collection of at least seven, probably nine, posterised paintings of Newington. Today I’ve finally bitten the bullet and painted the church.

Today it’s the turn of the Shire colour scheme, so the first layer was a combination of Shire yellow, Shire green and Shire olive. Then the second was just Shire blue. And the third was Shire grey, green apatite genuine and forest brown. The sky was a combination of Shire yellow and Shire grey: With anything else in there it would have looked too green and I’d decided t9 not use cerulean blue in there today. For the first time in a while, I put in the sky first, just because of all the that was going to be put in front of it. I think I prefer the paintings in this collection where the sky is added at the end: when the sky is added at the start, I fill it right up to the edges and it loses its sketchiness.

For the two big tree shapes, the colour layers were stabbed on rather than accurately glazed and I removed a little bit of paint at the end with kitchen paper and tried to add some marks suggesting branches. I think they came out OK.

Something else I did differently today was to put down my starting pencil outline freehand without using a ruler or a grid. Maybe the tower is a bit too narrow and a bit over to the left if you look really closely but it’s too late to pick a second left back now.

After all three layers were down and I’d removed the masking fluid, I thought the white highlights on the church and the gravestones were all a bit too white, so I put over some watery mixes of my first layer colours, overlapping the edges to connect the highlighted shoes to what was behind them. And that was me done.

This one’s not too bad if I ignore the possible draftsmanship problem. Posterised Shire paintings have a definite feel to them and that’s definitely present here. For a normal painting with the Shire colours, I’d have to include some burnt sienna to calm down all those greens but this is a posterised painting: the values do all the work and if the colours aren’t right that’s not an issue. This one didn’t sell at the Newington garden party so is now in the shop window.