One Color, One Session: Painting a Moody Architecture Study with Daniel Smith Lunar Black
Some paintings start with a clear vision. This one started on a girl's night out in Nashville. My sister-in-law had taken me to a place called The Horn for Somalian food and genuinely incredible chai — the kind of chai you think about for weeks afterward. As we were driving away down 19th Avenue South, I spotted it: this stunning stone church facade, all shadow and structure and drama. I grabbed my phone and fumbled to get a shot while she was still driving.
That building was the Scarritt Bennett Center church, and months later it became the subject of my first serious monochromatic architectural study — painted entirely in Daniel Smith Lunar Black, entirely on wet paper, in a single uninterrupted session. No color. No gouache. Just black pigment, water,
and movement.
The Setup: Why I Wet Both Sides of the Paper
I worked on Canson Heritage Hot Press 140 pound watercolor paper, which I thoroughly wetted on both the front and the back before laying down a single drop of paint. I get asked about this a lot, so let me explain why both sides matter.
The front is obvious — that is where the watercolor goes and you need it wet to get the paint moving. But wetting the back serves two important purposes. First, it extends your working time significantly. With moisture on both sides, the paper stays saturated for much longer, which is critical when you want to keep working wet into wet without things drying out on you mid-session. Second, it prevents buckling. If you soak the front of a sheet of watercolor paper and leave the back dry, the paper will curl and ridge into valleys and hills that completely disrupt how the water flows. With both sides wet, the paper stays flat and flexible — so flexible, in fact, that I could roll it into a cylinder if I wanted to. I actually did something similar during my ammonite painting using this same method.
The Only Pigment: Daniel Smith Lunar Black
I chose Daniel Smith Lunar Black for this painting because it is one of the most granulating blacks available — and granulation was everything I was after. Rather than drying into a flat, even field of dark, Lunar Black separates and clusters into textured blooms as it dries, which gives the painting an organic, atmospheric quality that feels perfect for stone architecture in winter light.
I was also inspired by a workshop I took about a year ago with artist Nicholas Lopez, who does beautiful work in this style. I highly recommend looking him up — he has videos on YouTube and is a fantastic teacher. And if you want to go deeper into architectural watercolor more broadly, Thomas Schaller — known as the Architect of Light — was one of the first artists who pulled me toward this genre. His paintings are extraordinary.
The Technique: Tilt, Spritz, and Let It Flow
This entire painting was completed in one go — meaning I never let the paper dry completely before calling it finished. The whole session took about twenty minutes. Here is the basic rhythm of how it worked.
I started with a flat brush — chosen deliberately because architecture has clean straight lines and a flat brush lets me stamp and drag in a way that mimics that structure. I loaded it with fresh tube paint, thick and concentrated, and covered the paper in Lunar Black. Then I picked up the paper, held it nearly vertical, and let gravity do the work.
The spray bottle was my other essential tool — and not just any spray bottle. I used one with an adjustable nozzle that lets me switch between a fine mist and fat, heavy drops. The fine mist encourages soft, spreading movement. The fat drops create that hard, crystalline granulation texture. I would spray an area, hold the paper at an angle for thirty seconds to a full minute, and let the water carry the paint wherever it wanted to go. A lot of this painting literally painted itself.
One important note if you try this: go in with your paint thick. Really thick, fresh from the tube. Because the paper is so saturated, even dense pigment will bloom and lighten and diffuse. If you go in watery, you will lose the marks almost entirely. It takes practice to get a feel for how much the wet surface will dilute what you put down — but that calibration is part of the fun.
Adding Structure: Lines, Edges, and the Rigger Brush
Once the initial wash was down and moving, I picked up a size 2 rigger brush — a synthetic one, specifically because I did not want too much water. On a surface this wet, any brush with a high water capacity will bloom excessively the moment it touches the paper. A synthetic rigger holds less, which gives me a slightly more controlled mark while still allowing the natural diffusion of a wet surface.
With this brush I darkened specific lines — the vertical edges of the building, the suggestion of window arches, the separation of planes. After placing each line, I would get in close with the spray bottle and spritz directly at it, then tilt the paper to pull the mark in the direction I wanted. If I needed an area lighter or wanted to break up a shape that was getting too heavy, a close spritz and a tilt would dissolve it back into the wash.
For the sides of the building, I used negative painting — blocking in a dark value on each side to frame the lighter facade in the center. In the original reference photo, that framing was created by foliage and bushes. I did not want to paint literal bushes, but I understood what they were doing compositionally: creating dark flanking values that push the eye toward the lighter center. So I just put in a block of dark and let it drip. Same effect, zero botanical detail required.
Recovering Light: Scrubbing Without Ruining
About midway through, I needed to bring some light back into the painting — but I wanted to do it while everything was still wet, not by scrubbing a dry surface. Scrubbing dry watercolor is obvious. It damages the paper fibers and leaves a rough patch that reads as a mistake. I wanted something softer and more diffused.
I switched to a firm-bristled synthetic round brush — the kind typically used for acrylic painting. It holds some water but not a lot, and the stiff bristles let me gently agitate the surface. Working while the paper was still wet meant the lifted areas blended back into their surroundings naturally, giving me those organic, diffused highlights rather than hard-edged scrubbed patches. This is a key advantage of the single-session approach: your corrections dissolve rather than standing out.
Suggesting Brick Without Painting Every Brick
Architecture paintings live or die by restraint. The temptation when you see a brick building is to paint individual bricks — all of them, in rows, with mortar lines, perfectly consistent. Do not do this. It will throw the painting off completely and destroy all the beautiful loose work underneath.
All you need is enough horizontal marks to suggest the idea of brick. A few lines, unevenly spaced, varying in darkness — and the viewer's brain will complete the pattern. Suggestion is far more powerful than documentation. I kept reminding myself of this throughout the session, especially in moments where I wanted to go in and add more.
What I Learned (and Why I Will Keep Painting Architecture)
Architecture is not my comfort zone. Flowers and animals — those feel natural. Buildings feel like math. But I refuse to just avoid things because they do not come easily, and this painting reminded me why. Working monochromatically forced me to think only in value. No color decisions, no palette mixing, no worrying about temperature or harmony. Just light and dark. It is one of the best exercises I know for understanding how a painting is actually structured.
And the single-session wet approach — never letting the paper fully dry — creates a unity across the painting that is almost impossible to achieve any other way. Everything bleeds into everything else. The edges are soft where they should be soft, hard only where you deliberately make them hard. The painting has a coherence and an atmosphere that feels earned rather than constructed.
Nashville, it turns out, gave me more than great food. If you want to try this technique yourself, grab a tube of Lunar Black, soak both sides of your paper, and see where the water takes you. It is messy — I got paint splatter on my tablet screen and I was wearing a black sweater, which I will say was excellent planning — but it is one of the most satisfying twenty minutes you can spend with a brush.