Today I took a vacation day to go work on a big painting project. Each Christmas, my church has a pageant called "Walk To The Manger". This year they decided that the set piece was not tall enough, so they extended it two feet across the bottom. I was asked to paint a new stone wall, to visually blend with the original painted backdrop. Took me about 7 hours to complete the project.
There was some strange thing happening to the original painting...it was done in oil paints, and had some kind of varnish put on the lower portion. It appeared to have oxidized, and turned a light gray. I was using acrylic paints. I decided to rework the main back wall, to better define the stones, and to soften some of the grayish color.
Below is the general process. I stained the plywood with a wash of brown. Then I used dark brown to define the shapes of the stones. I added golden brown highlites, then darker brown shadows. I used a spritzer bottle with water in it, and rubbed a lot of it with rags, to soft-blend my brush strokes. Then I used a dark brown again, to define some cracks between the stones. Finally I used a gray wash that was close to the "oxydized" stain on the original oil painting. I sprayed water over the wash, and then rubbed the gray areas...it looked a bit like fog when done. All in all...a fun day working large-scale!!
