Barsana Monastery – digital painting (shading with solid colors)

Last Updated on March 27, 2017 by Patrick

I have recently seen a magnetic postcard on a friend of mine’s refrigerator with Barsana Monastery in Maramures County, in our country, and it was a sunset (or sunrise) photo with beautiful colors and I immediately loved it. I secretly took a picture of it (my friend was not in the kitchen with me) with my phone in order to take it home with me so I can digitally paint it later on.

In this installment I would like to point out a method of shading in digital paintings (and in traditional paintings as well), regardless of whatever tools you use, and that is shading with solid colors. I’ve also used partially pressure sensitive opacities, but I used mostly, for this painting, solid colors so I can manipulate them and gain different kinds of shades, shadows and all, from the very subtle ones to the very obvious.

This just got to me, while I was painting from reference (yes, from reference) this beautiful maramuresan monastery at dawn or dusk, to show you, in this first work in progress installment, the method of shading that I use and what I want to obtain. Sketching with big blocks of colors is also a very good method to start painting but not only, it is a wonderful method to put down your basics and refine them along the way in order to obtain fine details in the frame, in the picture. Composition, also, is not ignored but respected all the way to the final result, with minor changes maybe.

So, let’s recap, I use blocks of solid colors to begin composing the picture and I took it to the next level, the next step, shading certain areas with solid colors so it can give meaning to me. After all, this is a landscape scenery with a traditional architectural element in the composition, a monastery.

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