THE OLD RED BARN

Copy the pattern onto cold press 140 pound watercolor paper.

One “rule” of landscapes is to work from your largest shapes to your smallest.

This is started with wetting the entire sky with a large 2” brush. While wet, I washed in the blue of the sky, mixing cobalt teal blue with cobalt. (you can try other combinations) Some of the wash went over the roofs of the barns, but that is fine. I lifted out some clouds with a thirsty brush. Then I dried the picture.

Step two was painting in some green for the grass area. It is very easy, if using wet-into-wet, for the grass area to start to look like one big green pond. So you need to have three things to prevent that: direction, variety of color, and texture.

I chose a wet-into-wet start, although I could just as easily have done dry brush. I wet the grass area, and dropped in raw sienna, French, pthalo, and new gamboge. I tried to direct the paint in a diagonal away from the barns to create some direction. As it began to dry, I spattered a little. While wet, you can scratch in some suggestions of grass or pull out some whites with the side of a credit card.

When painting a field, you have to remember that grass, like other things, follows the rules of perspective, aerial (atmospheric) perspective. The main things to remember are:

The more distant, the smaller things appear; color becomes more muted and cooler (bluer) in appearance; and details disappear. So grass in the foreground will have more detail and cleaner color.  HOWEVER, keep the “pretty” color near your center of interest, not going off the page.

The field, rather than be a flat plane of color, should be used to subtly move your eye through the picture, through shadows, color change, texture, etc.

When your grass is dry, you can dry brush, gliding the side of a large round brush across. You can dry spatter. You can also use a fan brush to pull wet paint up into blades of grass.

When the grass is dry, work on the barns. Light is coming from the left side, so that side of the barn has the purest color. It is painted with red mixed with burnt sienna. The side of the barn is the same, only deeper color and mixed with some French ultramarine. More ultramarine is added just under the eave of the roof to add some shadow.

The top of the rear barn is painted the same, except more muted in color because it is further distant. The bottom is raw sienna. (later muted with a thin glaze of blue) The smallest building is painted with a glaze of purple, darker in the shadows.Its roof is a dirty green, shadowed near the red barn with burnt sienna.

The roofs of the barns are a wash of cobalt with some pale cool red, muted with some raw sienna. While wet, you can scratch some lines in the roof to indicate the metal roof. Just don’t make stripes, just indicate some lines the parallel the roof edge. Be sure the angle is correct. The rear roof is done the same, leaving white where the sun causes a glare on the roof.

THAT IS AS FAR AS WE GOT THIS WEEK. HERE IS HOW WE WILL FINISH THE PICTURE:

The doors of the barns are done with dark mix of burnt sienna, red, and Pthalo blue. It is darker at the top of windows and doors because the light hits the lower areas but not the tops. Paint the windows with a dark mixture of Pthalo or French ultramarine with burnt sienna. You can indicate more barn texture if you wish.

Finish the clouds by lifting off additional color gently, then shading the bottoms with a violet mixed with whatever blue you used for the sky with some cool red. 

There are vents in the roof of the closest barn. Darken the left side and bottoms for shadow. Then

create a long shadow underneath the vents to the edge of the roof with a darker gray mixed from the

same roof colors.

The front barn sits on cement blocks. They are painted with a raw sienna on the outside and the shadowed side, underneath teh barn, is darker, burnt sienna with blue. In one part you can see grass

growing underneath the barn.

To finish up the grass, spatter some texture in the foreground. Spatter the road, if you made one.

Create some indications of grass, especially on the edge of the road.

Lightly with a fine brush paint in the lightning rods on the roofs. These should not be very dark, nor 

get too much attention, so blot them if they seem too dark.