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How to Paint a Simple Country Church
The church has always held special meaning to our family, and I’ve long wanted to paint a little white country church. Today the girls from At Home DIY are sharing our projects for October. This month’s challenge was to create something for our walls, so this was the perfect opportunity to challenge myself with a DIY painting!
I grew up going to church and Sunday School every week, and I was even a PK (pastor’s/preacher’s kid) for a few years! Mr DIY is also a PK, and guess what he grew up to be? If you guessed a pastor, you’d be correct! ⛪ You can read more about our journey and find out where we’ve lived here.
I’ve always been drawn to simple country churches. A couple years ago I spotted a sweet church painting in a local shop and wanted to buy it, but it was not cheap. So I held off, knowing that one day I would put paintbrush to canvas and figure out how to paint my own church!
I’m not an artist, and I have no real painting experience. I have dabbled in acrylics, but realism is definitely a stretch for me! I can paint a decent pumpkin (like on these DIY pumpkin pillows, and the ‘hello pumpkin’ sign in this post), but I don’t think I’ve ever painted a building. Oh wait, I attempted to paint the Nashville skyline at a painting class, but wasn’t happy with my attempts and later painted over it!
I spent some wee hours of the morning thinking about how I could pull this off (do your creative thoughts wake you up at night?).
There’s a long narrow spot on our gallery wall in the sunroom where I wanted to hang a church painting and I had the perfect piece of scrap wood that I found in our backyard wood pile.
I had some inspiration pictures, and early on Saturday morning, decided to just dive in and see if this would be a craft fail or not! I guess the fact that I’m posting this means I’m happy with the results!
This project cost me
Supplies
- canvas or piece of wood (my plywood measures 13″ x 24.5″)
- assorted acrylic paints
- variety of craft brushes
- glass of water
- paper towels
- paper plates
- inspiration pictures (unless you can paint something from your head! In that case I envy you!)
Here’s the wood I used for my church painting. My pup Millie likes to inspect everything.
This wood is rough, so I used my palm sander and sanded it really well with 80 grit sandpaper to smooth as much as possible and then followed that with a finer 120 grit.
Next I brushed on 2 coats of white chalk paint, letting the first coat dry before painting the second. I used Dixie Belle “Cotton”; it’s a nice, creamy white. Here’s a close up so you can see that I’m not painting on a perfect piece of wood!
Now here’s where it gets tricky. I wanted to be able to blend the acrylic paints on the surface of the wood, but wasn’t sure if that was possible on a matte chalk paint base.
So I put my thinking cap on, and decided to apply a coat of clear wax to give the surface of the wood board a little bit of slick. I used Dixie Belle’s “Best Dang Wax”. It’s a white wax, and I wanted to be very sure that my white chalk paint didn’t yellow. This wax did the trick! If you’re not sure if your wax will yellow, test it first on a small scrap!
because I had everything on hand. However, here’s what you’ll need if you want to paint your own church.
Inspiration Paintings
I wanted to keep my church as simple as possible. The church on the right is the one I very nearly bought and I found the other one online here. I liked different elements from each picture, so kept these in front of me while painting my own version of a simple country church.
Painting with Acrylics
Time to paint! I like painting with acrylics because they’re bright and vibrant and a little color goes a long way! They’re also very easy to blend, and they work nicely with water. My first order of business was to paint the outline of the church. I lightly drew the shape on with a pencil first before going over it with a paintbrush. This is freehand, it’s FAR from perfect, but you don’t see many perfect little country churches, right? That’s part of their charm.
After goofing and trying to erase my pencil line, I quickly learned that a RED PENCIL ERASER will leave red marks on your work. I wasn’t too worried as I was planning on painting a background anyway.
Normally, I’m pretty sure you paint and blend your background first. However, in this case I wanted a white church, so I started by painting the outline of the church using black acrylic paint and a very small brush. How do you like my artist’s palette?
I think outlining the church was the hardest part of the process! You can see pencil marks, and it’s a little wonky, but I really wasn’t going for perfection anyway! You can see that I chose to blend the styles of the churches from my inspiration pieces, going for a simple steeple and one stained glass piece on the church itself.
SEARCH SWEET COUNTRY
Search Sweet Country—one of the greatest novels ever to come out of the African continent—follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters: an idealistic professor, a lovely young witch, a wide-eyed student, a corrupt politician and his hack sidekick, a business-savvy young woman, a healer, a bishop, and a crazy man intent on founding his own village. Their collective narratives create a portrait of a country where colonialism is dying, but democracy remains elusive. Search Sweet Country is a timeless, near-forgotten gem by a virtuosic writer, as necessary now as when the book was first published. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Dickens’s London, Laing’s Accra brims with both lush specificity and universal relevance.
First published in 1986, this new edition comes beautifully packaged and with a foreword by Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, and director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.
Praise for Search Sweet Country:
“The finest novel written in English ever to come out of the African continent.”
—From the introduction by Binyavanga Wainaina
“Exuberantly reels with language and imagery reminiscent of the early Joyce.”
—Library Journal
“A figurative, comic treat, filled with wild characters and dizzy, wink-filled prose.”
—Flavorwire
“[Laing’s] sentences can only be described as heated, bubbling over with images, slamming metaphor and simile against quiet and simple observation, sometimes purposefully confusing meanings in the most poetic fashion…Perhaps it’s the poet in Laing that privileges wordplay over exposition to create both textual wonder and a sense of wondering exactly what we are wondering about.”
—Slate.com
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Advent Sale Week One!
Our annual advent sale returns today with the return of the holiday classic The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, plus celebratory mugs and bundles, while supplies last! Happy shopping. Check back each Monday for the remainder of 2023 for more special product, deals, and more from McSweeney’s.
