![]() These works span across any and all mediums, allowing artists the freedom to interpret such imageries through their eyes. This art form has evolved over the years, from classical paintings of rolling hills to modern, sometimes even urban landscapes of metropolitan scenes. Imageries in these works vary from mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. See more nocturne examples at my nocturne board at Pinterest.Landscape art refers to works that take inspiration from nature. So painters will use the moon as their light source, and exaggerate its effects. Although moonlight is 450,000 times less bright that the sun, it does offer a tiny bit more light than than a moonless night. Moonlight – Many nocturnes are moonlight paintings.If the sky is lighter in value than the land-based elements, (as in Doerflinger’s painting), its deep blue or blue-green color is a good way bring luminosity to the painting. The difference in value between the sky and the land is one place where the night is less stingy with its value contrasts, so use it to your advantage. Occasionally, however, the sky can be darker than the land-based elements, as we see in Remington’s The Night Rider, above. This is the case in the nocturne, as well. Skies – In daylight painting, the biggest value contrast usually occurs between the land and the sky.Values contrasts are significantly diminished. So we will often need to heighten the value differences, at least to some degree. Values – Because light levels are so low at night, the range between light and dark is narrowed.(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 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.James Gurney, in his book Color and Light, goes into this more in the section called Is Moonlight Blue?īill Cramer, Still of the Night, 2014, oil, 12″ x 9″. 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.
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