#Night time palette tutorial full#
(Only full sunlight can produce intense colors like that.) If the colors are are too low in saturation, they will read as gray and not convey the blue and blue-green hue character that is so essential to the nocturne. If saturation is too high, the scene will look unnatural. Color saturation – The saturation levels of the colors should not be too high or too low.Of course, these colors are all very intense pigments and will need to be desaturated for the nocturne. Pigment options – To create the blues and blue-greens that are so effective in the nocturne, painters turn to colors like phthalo blue, phthalo green, turquoise blue, Prussian blue, and ultramarine blue.Review my nocturne board at Pinterest, and you’ll see just how may paintings rely on this color set. We may not necessarily observe these colors in the actual scene, but in a painting, they are particularly effective at suggesting the colors of night. Hue families – In my experience, the most important color strategy for the nocturne is the use of cooler colors in particular, blues and blue-greens.As the most saturated color zone in the painting, the sky can set the color tone of the painting and make a night scene glow. Also note the contrast between the sky and the treetops. To make the effects of the moonlight more dramatic, she exaggerates the value contrasts in the rocks and water’s edge - but not too much. These colors are desaturated with ivory black and alizarin crimson.
In Moonlight Moment, Heavner uses several blue and green pigments: ultramarine blue and, in sparing amounts, phthalo green, phthalo turquoise, and phthalo blue. Obadinah Heavner, Moonlight Moment, 2021, oil on panel, 40″ x 30″ James Gurney, in his book Color and Light, goes into this more in the section called Is Moonlight Blue? The Purkinje shift notes that although our eyes can hardly perceive color in the dark, they are more sensitive to green wavelengths. There is also a scientific explanation as to why we respond well to greens in a nocturne. He is exaggerating or modifying the colors in such a way that the they make a more effective statement about the color of night than the colors he actually saw. Perhaps a moonlit night in the West actually produces such colors, but more likely, Remington is performing perceptual sleight of hand with his colors. In both of the examples below, Remington shifts the lights toward green. These color families are particularly effective as suggesting the colors of night. I observed a common color thread in his paintings: he not only relied heavily on blues and rich black-like colors, as one might expect, but he also used a great deal of blue-greens and greens. When I first tried painting nocturnes over a decade ago, I found inspiration in Frederick Remington’s nocturnes of the American West. Add more color than is actually seen in the dark - especially colors in the blue and blue-green families.Exaggerate the value contrasts slightly, to replace what is lost in the absence of a strong light source.Make the values lighter than they would actually be at night,.To paint a nocturne, therefore, the painter must be willing to modify colors and values in three ways: Once light enters the scene (even partial light, as shown in the right photo), we are able to make out the individual hues in each painting. This is because our eyes do not perceive color in very low-light conditions. In the left photo, above, taken at night, colors are barely discernible.