Round The Back Of Hartlip Church

The main colours today were Mayan blue, rose dore, raw sienna and Indian yellow, so I can’t really classify it under a single colour key.  The green apatite genuine and hematite violet genuine also made appearances and titanium white, cadmium yellow and cadmium red came on for late flourishes.

I started with a pencil outline, cheating a bit by dividing the paper into a 4*3 grid of squares and using a ruler to put down some rough perspective lines.  I rubbed out the pencil to a point close to invisibility, then drew in freehand lines with a black rollerball, making sure to include the odd brick.  I then spattered on some masking fluid and masked out the flagpole me edges of the church ready for the sky to go down.

The sky is Mayan blue, hematite violet genuine and a little bit of rose dore.  Those two Daniel Smith colours are just beasts in the sky, performing all sorts of tricks.  I added a bit of greenage against the sky in both sides with the green apatite genuine and some little bits of blue and yellow.

And then onto painting the church.  I started with a very loose underpainting with all my main six colours, generally veering towards Indian yellow in the sun, the blues and violets in the shadows and the rose on the conventional brickwork but not worrying about edges within the church and just having fun.  Then I built up the church layer by layer, painting more accurately around edges.  At the end I put on two unifying layers of raw sienna with a bit of the hematite violet – without the unifying layer, the shapes never look like they belong together.  It’s a three step process: underpainting to capture the light, then paint in the shapes, then the final unifying glaze.  That middle step might have multiple glazes.

I added some white highlights at the end but these didn’t really work and have ended up being mixed into other colours.  And I added white, yellow and red opaque spatters at the end.  The red spatters are good but the white ones turned grey (as usual) and the yellow ones may have been a bit too watery today.  I like the spatters in the sky – they make it look like a windy day.

Finally I added three birds in the hematite violet and rubbed off all the masking fluid spatters.

Final result?  Well, I’ve caught a bit if sunlight and wind but there are some muddy bits in there.  This reminds me of another church painting but feels inferior to that one.  Still, the locals here can’t get enough of these church paintings, so this will be going up for sale.

It still doesn’t feel like my watercolour work has properly kicked off for 2022.  If I was picked as a wildcard for Landscape Artist Of The Year and asked to film tomorrow, I’d probably be packing the oil pastels.