Allan Burch was commissioned by University of San Diego to create a painting of Cathedral at Alcalá de Henares, Spain, a building whose late Gothic style is the inspiration for the campus architecture, also known as Alcalá Park.

Here’s a peek at Allan’s process:

“I was provided with some photo reference of the Cathedral. I gathered a few shots from my own research, too. Thinking about the background, I also looked around for a nice complementary sky. My "sketch" is the basic composite of my photos. My goal here is value composition; the gray border is to simulate the intricate gold bordering which will be part of the final design.”

First, illustration board is gessoed and the pencil underdrawing added:

“The next step is to mess it all up, embrace failure, and leave myself nowhere to go but up. Actually, I do this to kill the white and to initiate the organic, painterly look with drips and blobs of paint from which I can start to create. I don't want to lose my linework, so the paint application isn't totally opaque.”

“Launching into the ‘unpainting’ process, I lay down some red oxide and burnt sienna acrylics, mixed with my special additive, to the building. I roughly silhouette the building and clean up the edges, as part of the "back and forth" process. With a nice stiff brush, I "unpaint," or lift out areas of light not only with the building but also the sky and clouds to bring out their light areas. This is the finished "underpainting" before the computer work.”

“The art is scanned in and warmed up a bit. Here is where I'll start phase 2, which consists of shoring up values and final color. Through a process of methods, I'll eventually arrive at a value combination that is pleasing to me.”

“Through another process of layers and channels, I'll eventually formulate a color combination that is pleasing to me. A balanced palette is always foremost in my mind. Here, it's warm with enough cool in the sky to balance things. The cools in the shadows enhance the sun hitting the walls, creating a truer sense of light, depth and balance to the color palette, and overall interest to the piece.”