Painting buildings

by Tissa Hewavitarane

You cannot avoid buildings for long if you are painting landscapes. You must learn to make them look convincing and portray the texture of their materials - stone walls, thatch, tiles, bricks or asbestos sheets.

One of the most common faults with texture is overworking. Some artists often believe it necessary to indicate every brick in a wall or to show every tile on a roof. They take hours painstakingly and needlessly, painting row after row of these.

It is difficult to convince people that suggestion is the key, that it's only necessary to show details in small portions of the wall or roof, and the viewers will fit in the rest themselves.

Buildings, boats, trees, fences and rocks all make a fascinating painting subjects especially when they have grown a little weather beaten due to the ravages of time and exposure to the elements.

For the watercolour painter, the challenge lies in knowing how to render a convincing illusion of weathered textures, without overworking the painting.

A lot of beginners tend to shy away from painting buildings because they think an intricate knowledge of the rules of perspective is required.

It is not so, in every painting. One can avoid the problems of complicated perspective by painting a house or a building from a straight forward viewpoint. But you must learn to make them look convincing and portray the texture of their materials - stones walls, thatch houses, tiles or bricks or clapboards.

Basic construction

Let's begin with the basic construction of the building, be it a house, temple, a church, or a tower. You have to mentally strip it of all its trappings, decoration and details, and regard it in its simplest form.

However complex and daunting a building looks at first sight, once it's broken down into geometric shapes such as cubes and cones with squares triangles or oblongs attached to them, it's not so daunting.

Combine this thinking with the basic rules of perspective. Once you've got these simple shapes looking right you can start adding the details such as windows and doors.

But many beginners seem to want to do these first, like a builder trying to paper the walls before he's finished the foundations properly.

This is because it's the desire to see how a least one bit of the painting will look when it's finished, but there's nothing more disheartening than spending hours on the details only to find that the basic shape or perspective is wrong and the whole think ruined.

Light and shade

Once having got our basic knowledge in drawings done, the next you have got to think about is light and shade. The usual mistake here is that not enough thought is given to the lighting, and the result is that a building looks flat and anaemic.

It seems fairly obvious that if you can see two sides of a building one should be darker than the other to give it solidity and depth. This fact of-ten seems to be forgotten once a painting is in progress.

Try putting a little pencilled cross on the top corner of your painting to remind you of the direction of the light.

It will also help you to get right angle the shadows are cast. Using every dark areas on a building would always make it look dramatic and the use of counter change, as described previously is very important.

Putting a dark tree behind a light roof to throw it up totally or placing the lightest part of the sky, behind a dark building, are both effects you should be using in your paintings.

Do not neglect the use of smaller incidental shadows the shadow under the guttering to show up the edge of the roof, under the window opening to give them depth; a chimney can be made to stand out by emphasising its shadow on the roof.

Remember the darker the shadow the brighter the adjacent parts appear. If the light, at the time you are painting a building, is not very bright you can use your imagination a bit and intensify the shadows, as long as their direction is consistent?

And that cross I mentioned earlier will make sure you do not slip up.

The form of an object is revealed by the contrast of light and shade on its surface, so shadow and cast shadows are powerful element, in making buildings look three dimensional. Generally, late afternoon is a good time to paint buildings, when long shadows travel across the contours of walls and throw surface features into sharp relief.

Favourite subjects

Among favourite buildings painted by watercolour artists are temples, cathedrals villas massive building house's and churches. These can look very attractive but they are often let down by overburden with details and all spontaneity is lost. Not only does this look amateurish, it also leaves nothing to the viewer's imagination.

Observe the building in my painting which looks more solid and real. I never wanted to paint modern buildings in the city. They do not arouse any feeling. I found old and weathered subjects like this building fascinating, and render their textures more effectively. This building is not so grand. It's an old storehouse in a far off village.

I have used the traditional techniques of glazing and heavy colours of burnt sienna, to convey the unauthentic texture of the weather beaten walls and the wooden shutters in the building. A touch of yellow ochre with deep olive green gives a pleasing grant appearance.

The kind of paper you choose will play an important part in the textures you create what I urge you to do is to try them out on spare pieces of paper first. Remember, a golfer practises strokes before putting a club to the ball.