Bungalow Nocturne Blues, 20″ x 16″, UART 320 dark board

Drawing on board with pastel pencil

Beginning stage with hard pastel

Initial layin of sky with soft pastels

When we were in Portland on our trip to the Northwest in October, we took walks in the early evening and morning and I experimented with taking shots with low light.  My Iphone 11 was supposed to be good at this and the shots came out really nicely. So I  wanted to paint my favorite one of a bungalow with beautiful blue sky behind it.  I did a half size drawing and immediately decided to add more to the sky and some of the road.  Then I did a color study on black Canson and realized that working on black was the way to go.  SO–I ordered 5 16 x 20 UART dark boards and eagerly waited for them to arrive.  A friend who paints with me has been using it for some time and I was happy to finally have the chance to give it a try.

The paper is much darker than it appears in the photo (cell phone really adds a lot of light), but it’s not black.  However, you can’t use graphite, so I used a pastel pencil.  I hate sharpening them and resist using them!  But for this painting, having an accurate drawing was essential.  I tried a hard pastel and it was too think and ungainly to use.

I began with hard pastels and, as you can see, started the sky too light.  But it didn’t seem to matter. I basically used the colors I was seeing but focused on blues and greens.  What I wanted was a painting with a lot of nuanced color with light hitting the trim on the window and posts, as well as the car.  The light was from a street light–no moon, unfortunately.

While i was working on “dark”, nothing ever seemed to be dark enough.  And now this photo, looks too dark!  I used a lot of my Terry Ludwig intense darks.  But I also used my Roche petit blues that I received as a gift last Christmas.  The grayed blue of the sky is a Blue Earth, but the rest of it is Roche. As are many of the colors, house, roof, etc.  They were perfect for this painting.

For once, I didn’t have a hard time doing the car!  It’s probably a Subaru (like mine) so it seemed quite familiar.

This is my first nocturne and i hope I’ll find more subject matter to do others. I’ve already started a quite different painting (also from Portland) on another of the dark boards and am loving it.  So who knows–this might be my next kick!