A painting of a mosque in Istanbul, Turkey using Paintology

Fig-1
Fig-1

Fig. 1 shows a painting of a mosque in Istanbul, Turkey and is a familiar site in the skyline if you have ever visited Istanbul. The architecture of these famous mosques are breathtaking with the domes breaking the longitudinal lines of the city sky and the minarets jutting out into the sky. The painting produced using the Paintology app was done on a 8 inch tablet and using the home-made stylus pen.

Fig-2
Fig-2

The first step towards painting is to do the ‘fill colors’ for the sky and the general main colors of the picture (fig. 2). The canvas was picked out with the bluish color and then using the ‘mist’ brush we sketch out the sky using a variation of whitish/grey colors. Try to do the strokes horizontally at first and then use a swirling action to create the cloud effects. The original picture showed a dark shade of the sky going down to the low horizon and this was rendered using a deeper color of blue. Notice also the horizon also has lighter shades in the sky which adds good effect to the overall painting without too much effort.

Fig-3
Fig-3
Fig-4
Fig-4

In fig. 3, I continue to add the main components of color for the mosque which essentially are dark colors with orange and white. At this stage many folks perhaps would give up and would feel unhappy with the whole painting, however, if you have read my original posts on techniques you will know that the painting is built on layers and will continue to come alive as you continue, so the short answer is ‘Don’t give up!’. If you look at fig. 4, you will see there is some shape coming into the whole painting and the brush tool that I use to fill more of the overlay is the ‘charcoal’. Make sure to adjust the density and hardness to get the right tone on the painting.

Fig-5
Fig-5
Fig-6
Fig-6

In fig. 5, I turn up the hardness in the charcoal brush setting in order to get more luminosity in the colors and I brush in the areas of orange and white (where the artificial lights are used to light up the mosque). Continue this process until you achieve something that resembles fig. 6 where the painting has been lifted with more highlights of the white. By switching from black to white, I further highlight the painting to finish with the end product shown in fig. 1.

Until next time, happy painting!

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