Hand painted in Rebelle 7 Pro on a Surface Pro 8 (i7, 16gb RAM) with Slim Pen 2.

Last year for pastor appreciation, I gifted my pastor a blank check for my services. After much deliberation with his wife, they chose a painting of their house. It’s been a wonderful place for them to raise their family and minister to all of us and they told me they love the view as they approach their front door.

It is very shady and welcoming and I wanted to capture that feeling, emphasizing the house and approach while not diminishing the old growth trees that shelter it.

I took pictures on an overcast day, which ended up being just what I needed, because the light was diffuse instead of casting hard shadows under the trees, allowing much better lighting of the house.

Progress Pictures

I got an interesting collection of brushes and experimented with using them on this piece. They are very loose brushes, and as I’ve been trying to learn a somewhat looser style (while not sacrificing my attention to detail) I thought they might be great for my goal to do more suggesting of the foliage covering and surrounding the house rather than trying to paint it all and ending up overwhelming the house.

The bricks were a nice challenge. I separated the sections of the house and roof so the transitions between them would be sharp, and then layered the different colors into the sections, trying to capture the feel of variagated brick.

Rebelle has a neat setting in the Layers panel called Lock Transparency. This allows me to put color into the area I want to paint on, and then lock the layer so I can only paint in that area. It makes working like this so much easier than overpainting and then erasing the edges.