I saw a tutorial from Lindsay Weirich aka The Frugal Crafter several months ago on her Youtube channel. It was of an old church on a hill with a beautiful sunset background. As soon as I saw it, I decided that I wanted to paint that for my cousin and his wife for their Christmas gift.
For my first attempt, I sketched out the church and then sketched in the hill – when I was close to being finished with the painting, I noticed that I had the back half of the church floating in the air. So, I recycled that sheet of paper to use the backside for something else, and started over.
When I started over I decided to make the painting a little larger and used a 9×12 inch piece of handmade watercolor paper that I purchased at Jerry’s Arterama . I’m so glad I did, because it was a rougher texture, and I think that it gave the sky more dimension.
The sky was painted first with a wet into wet technique. I just love the vibrancy of the sunset.
Then I added in the roof and some shadows and highlights on the church itself. I also filled in the grassy hill.
I thought the roof was looking a little too weak, and the shadows were a little too dark, so I scrubbed out some of the shadows. To make the roof darker, I used my Pentel brush pen which contained black ink.
The only problem with using the black ink was that I lost any dimension, so I got out my dark grey gel pen and added some highlights to the roof. And here is the finished product again!
I think it turned out well – and more importantly, my family loved their gift!
Brandi Made It! 