I keep redoing the same barn roof and the fourth attempt is worse than the third
So this is a small one, 9x12, a barn at the edge of a field I drive past on the way to my daughter's swim practice. I've painted the roof four times now. I wiped it off twice with a wet rag, scraped once, painted over it once.
The problem is I keep making the roof too even. Like tile, when it should read as corrugated metal with rust eating into it. Every time I lay the lines in I make them all the same distance apart and the same value, and it looks like a barcode. My brain knows better and my hand still does it.
The thing I'm actually stuck on: do I fight it and keep the corrugation visible, or do I just push the whole roof back into shadow so the eye doesn't go there at all and let the light sit on the field instead? Second option feels like cheating, but I've been on this roof for three evenings after bedtime and I'm starting to resent the painting.
Also I'm working with a Mars black I mixed with a little burnt sienna for the rust and it keeps coming out orange in a way that looks like a pumpkin. Might be the paint, might be me.
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ok the "my brain knows better and my hand still does it" thing is so real and so annoying, sorry 🙃 but honestly I think the barcode problem isn't about your hand, it's about doing the corrugation in one pass. Every time you lay all the lines down together they inherit the same rhythm because your wrist settles into a tempo. What's helped me on stuff like this is breaking the roof into maybe three or four panels and doing them in different sittings, or at least different values, so the spacing has to fight itself a little. Also rust doesn't respect the lines, it eats across them, so if the rust is what you're painting the viewer will read metal even if the corrugation is half there.
And no, don't wipe it a fifth time, four attempts on one 9x12 is already a lot of love and the third one probably had something in it you're not seeing right now. I'd paint this one out to the end even if the roof stays wrong, then decide. Also kind of want to see it if you post the WIP, the drive-to-swim-practice barn is a good subject.
You're right about the single-pass rhythm, though I'd push back slightly on the panel-by-panel solution. Painting the sections in separate sittings gives you variation in the spacing, but it also tends to give you variation in the wet edge, and dried breaks between panels can read as dents in the metal if you're not careful to blend them.
What has served me better on corrugated surfaces is to lay the lines down as a light wash of the base tone first, deliberately uneven, then come back with the dark accents only where the form actually turns. Corrugation is a rhythm of light and shadow, not a set of drawn edges, and if you paint the shadow side first the lines have to sit where the light puts them rather than where your wrist wants them. Also worth checking your reference against a mirror. The symmetry jumps out immediately and you can see whether the roof is even or whether you have simply been looking at it too long.
Ok the "rhythm of light and shadow, not a pattern" thing just landed for me. I've been painting the lines, not the light. That's the whole problem, isn't it.
Question though, since I'm the one who has to go do this tonight: when you lay the base tone down uneven, are you doing that thin and letting it dry before the darks go in? I feel like if I go back in while it's still wet I'll just smear it back into an even stripe and be right back where I started. Acrylics dry fast so it's not a huge wait, but I want to know if the unevenness is supposed to survive or if it's just there to break up my hand's tempo.
Also fair point on the panel idea, I hadn't thought about the dried breaks reading as dents. That would be a very me kind of fix, solve the barcode and invent new dents.
The "wrist settles into a tempo" thing is exactly it, that's what I couldn't put into words. One pass and my hand just goes into metronome mode.
But the panel idea scares me a little. I'm worried the seams will show, like four little roofs sitting next to each other instead of one. Did you blend across them while the paint was still open, or just let the edges be and hope they read as one thing from a distance? Because letting it dry in four chunks feels like it'd fight the "same value" problem but maybe create a new one.
The rust eating across the lines part I think I can actually do. That I believe.