The first night scene I experimented with was the radio towers in Cedar Hill, Texas. I wanted the reds of the lights to shine and vibrate in the night sky. I mixed a very dark green that was indiscernible to the prussian blue and I weaved it into the darkness. The magic is how they vibrate with the red complementery color.

My next experiment was creating a lake or ocean scene with the moon over head, Just glowing light does not give the illustion of depth so different combinations in temperature, contrast and size allowed me to make light look like it was going back into the scene instead of just glowing, I found depth using light.

Since then I have been continuing to create light with combinations of hue instead of using white. White can be quite opaque and it is obvious in creating light-there is not subtlety to using white on a dark background, that’s why the complementery combinations are so effective.

I have been exploring light from using only paper in the last few pastel images, as in the previous post. I learned a technique of weaving pastels into circles around dark areas with a definite transparency to make it look like there is light.

The moon scene above is from Lake Murray, my son was 8 or so and we layed on the rocks and watched the moon. It is his favorite painting of mine, it is called the Silence of Stars– it is available in prints on Fine Art America.

The pastel to the right is a very recent pastel. It was from a very rough sketch in pen-as I used to do. It is from Galveston back in the nineties. We used to stay on the beach in a bungalow.

The night sky has always been a fascination of mine. What I want to capture is how open and endless the darkness is but it is so much more then simply black. It is rich with colors of light.

A current sketch I started is from Shark River Inlet in Belmar New Jersey, we were scuba diving and the blackness of the water is much like black ink and you disappear into the blackness, the only light you see is barely the moon and stars and the large spotlights you bring with you.

I feel oil painting is much easier to capture the light in the darkness, if you add too much hue to the pastel you lose the transparency which makes light truly shine.

Water and night skies are my common focus in much of my studies.

Here are some other images of the night sky.