Church Of San Pedro De Atacama, Chile

– lots of recent paintings have been in the key of orange cool: Duane Allman, I Can Read Your Mind, A Moment At Stonehenge

– that’s a lot of warm yellow, cool blue and warm red.  Maybe I need to give the cool yellow, warm blue and cool red a go, just to even things out a bit

– so I’ll be painting in the key of purple cool

– based on my previous experience, my best paintings in purple cool are of white buildings in the sun

– so let’s find one of those, then and paint it!

Today’s colours were transparent yellow, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  Raw sienna was the alternative choice of cool yellow but that’s had some recent action (when it disappointed).  And it’s a genuine three colour job today, with no supporting cast.  As subject matter, I picked this church in Chile, based on a photo taken by old friend Derek Stone on his recent tour of the Andes on a bike.

I started by putting down an accurate pencil drawing using a grid and a ruler.  At some point I need to get back to doing more freehand drawings but not today.  And I masked out a few small highlights.

And then I got to work with the colour.  First was the sky.  It’s very plain and blue in the source photo and I copied this at first but later dropped in the odd bit of yellow and red in later layers and even tried scuffing things up with some fast backward and forward diagonal strikes with the brush.  I think I eventually ended up with four layers in the sky: I wanted it to be quite dark to contrast against the church.

For the other shapes, I started with the darks in the door and windows then, rather than doing my usual thing and going from back to front, I jumped around a bit, doing whichever shapes I fancied at the time.  There were four main sets of shapes:

– the roofs were mainly yellow and red, with little bits of the three primaries charged in

– the greenery started by laying yellow over the blue sky and dragging it downwards, with blue and red later charged in.  Quite a lot of red, to be honest – I wanted quite a neutral green.  There are three or four layers of colour in those greens.

– the driveway was made by mixing the red and yellow, varying the proportions as I filled out the shape.  I threw in some salt, too, to get a bit of texture.

– for the left facing sides of the building, I started with a very watery neutral mix of all three colours, then dropped in bits of red, yellow and blue wherever they felt right and balanced things.  I ended up dabbing these colours dry to keep them restrained.  Afterwards, I went over them with a watery neutral mix to bring them together in the same way that gravy brings together a main course on Masterchef.

– for the right facing, sunlit, sides of the building I just put on watery red, yellow and blue wherever felt right (leaving lots of white) and dabbed it dry.

And then I was ready to add shadow.  I started with a blue, then put on a layer of purple afterwards (after my first set of shadows ended up too varied after not mixing enough colour to begin with – schoolboy error).  Then I stepped back and looked at the painting.  My impression was that  there wasn’t enough distinction between the two planes at every forward pointing corner.  So I mixed up some purple to neutral colour, painted it along the left side of the edges and tried to fade it into the rest of the left facing edge with water.  I did this a couple of times and, to be honest, my faded out glazes ended up more like flat glazes.  But they did the trick.

Fun ally, I applied the finishing touches.  A few tiny details, the removal of masking fluid and stamping in the metal fence with an old credit card.  And that was me done.

The final painting isn’t perfect but I’m happy with it.  Maybe if an inch and a half of boring stuff were to be cropped off the left it would look better.  But the colours in those left facing walls are amazing and I like how the church contrasts against the sky, with some little bits of white paper separating the two of them in places.  This one’s up for sale

<Edit: I’ve just made it to the end of Derek’s YouTube video.  I wasn’t expecting him to crash one of my paintings from 15 months ago!>