St Michael’s & All Saints Church, Hartlip

I went for a reasonably conventional sky today, with the Ultramarine use, the raw sienna and a bit of viridian in places.  Oh, and a tiny bit of the magenta.  I was careful to put the darkest, clearest blue behind the flagpole and weather vane that l’d masked out.

And then there was the rest.  The purple tree on the left came out than I could have dreamed but the rest was never quite right.  Thin glazes were required a number of times to bring all the stonework together, all the grass together, all the roofs together, the whole path together.  There was lots of dabbing off to add texture to the stonework and roofs.

Some finishing touches were still necessary though.  I added in flowers in a number of places using cadmium red and cadmium yellow (this was a job for opaque paints).  To repeat the cadmiums in the rest of the painting, I added thin orangey washes to the roofs and some yellow highlights to some of the bits facing the sun – this helped correct my error in making the left facing planes too dark and not leaving white highlights.  I also added some cadmium yellow bits to the grass and dabbed them a bit with a paper towel.  Finally, I turned a couple of accidental purple drips into birds and dropped some water into the stonework to get some deliberate runbacks, which look OK.

Final verdict?  Well, there are a lot of good individual elements but as a whole the painting suffers from the lack of any light valued areas.  But it was good enough to be put up for sale and was sold to a local while the brushes were still wet.  As is usual for all my church paintings, 100% of the proceeds were donated to the church.