Friday 1 March 2013

Cathedral - From WIP To Finished Painting

The point of this post is to give an insight into how this painting was done. I enjoy drawing cathedrals but I didn't paint one in a while so I thought it was about time. It was also going to be a challenge for me, they're not exactly the easiest subjects to paint.

I started off by roughly drawing in the shapes in pencil and applying watered down watercolour paint at light areas of the building. I was using St Mark's Basilica in Venice as a guide but I wasn't being too strict on details.



Stretching clingfilm over wet paint and leaving it to dry creates some nice textures and effects as you can see here.




After I removed the clingfilm, I painted in more details and then put some more clingfilm over these newly painted areas. It's time consuming, and there's a lot of waiting around for paint to dry, but it's worth it. I learnt this trick off Jean Haines, an unbelievably great artist. Google her and check out her work. 



Dropping salt onto wet paint creates some cool blotchy effects. It gives an antiquated look to your painting after it dries. All you need to do is sprinke a little salt onto wet areas of  the paper. The salt absorbs the paint leaving behind the desired effect.


You can see how the effect the salt and clingfilm has here in this photo. This photo is from a different painting.




I was going to let the paint drip from the the cathedral to the bottom of the page but I realised the buildings' sense of scale would be taken away. Adding figures as tiny little squiggles at the bottom, turned the building into an imposing figure overlooking the little people.



I could have left it here and I think it would've looked fairly cool. I'll go back and do something similar to this in the future.


Here I pressed down some roughly cut masking tape and applied it to certain areas. I then painted around these in a darker colour to that which was under the tape.




The finished piece. Hope you like it. :)