Painting a nocturne

Fresh paint - just finished

Painting a nocturne is a challenging proposition for the oil painter who is used to painting realistically. The problem arises with the fact that things are dark at night and therefore making it virtually impossible to get usable reference. And even if you manage to get reference through long exposures or some other means, representing it in a painting that's meant to portray the night accurately would result in a painting with very little details.  It would necessarily need to be predominantly black or very nearly so.

So, the reality is, lighting and details in nocturnes aren't exactly natural.  However, successful nocturnes are believable because our minds imagine the moonlight to be much brighter than it could ever be (I think I read somewhere that moonlight is something like 20,000 times weaker than sunlight).  That reality aside, if we start with a reference with strong overhead lighting (like mid-day), and paint it with a darker sky and less contrast, we can trick the mind into substituting the sun with the moon since we tend to think of the moon as shining directly from the middle of the sky. Of course, we also have to create an overall bluish hue as we tend to think of nighttime as being cooler than daylight.  I've found a great way to do this is through the use of glazes (that's right, it's plural, glazes, usually more than one).  You can get an overview of how I do that by watching the short YouTube video below.

The full project is included in my Advanced Oil Painting Techniques and Tactics course, found here.

I also have the full project broken out of the course in case you're interested in the step-by-step project alone. It can be found here.

A complete listing of all the courses I currently have available can be found at simpleapproachoilpainting.com

"Midnight Snack"
Oil on Canvas
28"x22"
Available