White Church

Here’s an 10 x 8 inch oil study of a church, painted from under a porch on a rainy day. What interested me was how the white color of the church resembles the tone of the sky, leaving the little dark shapes of the clock face and windows almost floating in air. You can see the warm underpainting peeking through the semi-opaque sky colors.



People often think the sky gets darker on an overcast or rainy day, but actually the opposite happens. It gets lighter in relation to anything else in the scene. Only the purest white snow can be lighter than an overcast sky.