Night scenes are the most rewarding designs to finish and the least forgiving to paint, for one structural reason: most of the picture sits in a narrow band at the dark end, so the shapes stop separating from each other. Get that right and a moonlit canvas has more presence on a wall than almost anything else. Here are the four in this catalog and how to handle them. Sunset designs ask for the same long gradients in warmer colors.
Moonlight Bay
A Kim Norlien design: a canoe pulled up on the shore of a still lake, a campfire burning low, the moon high over the far treeline and its reflection running back across the water toward you.
It works because it has two light sources doing different jobs. The moon is cool and comes from above, the fire is warm and comes from the ground, and everything in the picture is lit by one or the other. That contrast is what stops it going flat, and it is the reason this is the easiest of the night designs to make look good.
House Near the Lake
A blue night scene: a house across the water with its windows lit, deer at the shoreline, a moon above. Much of the canvas is deep blue, which is exactly the difficulty described below, but the lit windows give the eye somewhere to land. You can see it in full on the House Near the Lake page.
Aurora Bliss
Also by Kim Norlien: a log cabin in snow under the northern lights, with a campfire in the foreground and snow-laden pines around it. The light here is the aurora rather than the moon, which is why the greens and violets in the sky read as unusual — they are lighting the snow rather than sitting behind it.
It is the most forgiving of the four to paint, and the snow is the reason. Broad, pale areas that cover fast, set against a sky doing something interesting. Aurora Bliss is a reasonable first night canvas.
Moonrise Song
Abraham Hunter. Wolves in deep snow with moonlit mountains behind them. The most demanding of the four, because wolf coats are made of many thin sections and the snow shadows sit close together in value. Moonrise Song is not the one to start on.
All four are in the catalog, and the cabin and lake designs generally in cabins.
The one thing that makes or breaks a night painting
Keep the darks separated. In a daylight scene the difference between a tree and the hill behind it is obvious. At night both are dark, and the whole picture depends on small differences between one dark and another. If you flatten those, you get a canvas that reads as a black shape with a moon in it.
In practice that means three habits:
- Rinse the brush properly between the dark colors. This matters more here than anywhere else. Two dark blues that have contaminated each other become one dark blue, and the shape you were painting disappears.
- Do not thin the dark paints. Thinned acrylic goes translucent, the white canvas shows through unevenly, and the dark areas end up patchy rather than deep. Second coat rather than more water.
- Paint the darks first, the lights last. The moon, the fire glow, the lit windows and the reflections are what carry the picture, and they look strongest laid over a canvas that is already dark. Save them for the end.
Light where it counts
Two practical notes about actually seeing what you are doing.
Work under a lamp placed to the side, and use a daylight-temperature bulb if you have one. A warm bulb makes every dark blue on the canvas look the same, and you will not be able to tell them apart while painting even though they are visibly different in daylight.
And read the numbers off the 11 by 17 printout rather than the canvas. On a dark design the printed numbers are the hardest to see of any kit, because the printing is dark on dark.
Where to hang one
Night paintings want a wall with some light on it. In a dim corner a dark canvas becomes a rectangle. Above a lamp, opposite a window, or with a picture light on it, the moon and the fire actually do something.
A satin varnish suits these designs better than matte, because the slight sheen deepens the darks. Let the canvas cure a few days first.
A note on the moon and mood
You will see it said that the lunar cycle affects mood and sleep, usually with the explanation that the body is mostly water and the moon moves the tides. It is worth knowing that this does not hold up. The tidal force the moon exerts on a person is vanishingly small, and reviews of the research have not found a reliable effect on mood or sleep.
The moon is worth painting because it is beautiful and because moonlight does something to a landscape that daylight cannot. That is a good enough reason on its own.
Your own night photograph
Worth being honest here: night photographs are the hardest thing to convert into a numbered canvas, for the same reason night scenes are hard to paint. If you want to try one, a custom kit will do it, but choose a photo taken at dusk rather than full dark, where there is still color in the sky and shapes still separate from each other.
The beginner's guide covers the mechanics, and other customers' finished canvases are in the customer gallery.
