Peeling paint presents a set of abstract shapes, rather similar to a sky scape. Different brush strokes can be used to achieve differing effects for this painting, when using cold press or rough watercolour paper.  

Make a line drawing of the shape of the door – the biggest drawing challenge here is the fretwork above the door – symmetry rules on this occasion so take your time, ensuring both sides match each other.  

There are two approaches to this: paint the stone work first or the door. I did a bit of both. I started at the top of the door, painting in, quite meticulously, the colour behind the fretwork. I used a blue I mixed from ultramarine and cerulean blues. The palette for the stone work:- yellow ochre, browns, purples, blues and chromatic black. If you have an old dry palette with lots of colours, the residue of colours in that provide a wonderful source for all of the aforementioned colours. 

The palette for the doors:- I mixed a few blues of my own, from light to dark using ultramarine blue, cerulean blue and white in varying combinations of strength, browns, from light to dark and yellow ochre. The stone tiles in the foreground I painted in a vary of purples. So this exercise uses most of the colour spectrum, apart from green.  

I painted the stone work using wet on wet, painting in subsequent layers of increased tone of my colours. I used a variety of brushstrokes, as this is quite abstract.  

The fretwork – take your time – it is nice to see symmetry in a part of a painting, mine is not perfect, but it is a really old door! I painted in a wash of blue and then put in the main shapes of the wood, using the side of the brush, not the tip, to use the texture of the paper. I worked from light to dark and the whole painting took me around six hours to complete. I painted in the door step using drip painting, let the paint move. I painted the tiles in the foreground last, again, wet on wet, using subsequent layers of increased tone of purple colours.