Bonfire Night - En Plein Air

Our horses hate fireworks, so I'll be sitting out under the overhang at the front of our stables keeping them company tonight.  I'm going to do some plein air painting with pastels, which will be a complete experiment.  I'll be looking out into the dark countryside with low level orangey lights behind me on the front wall of the stables. Earlier this afternoon I prepared a black sheet of MiTientes mixed media paper and laid a charcoal background on a sheet of A3 white mixed media paper.   All I wanted to do was position the horizon line on both and put in a few details in the daylight so - fingers crossed - I'll be able to navigate my way around each piece of work after it gets dark.  I've attached both so you can see where I'm starting from. The results could be really interesting or absolute rubbish.  Either way, I'll upload them both tomorrow so you can see what happens.

Plein air painting in the dark was interesting!   The orange lights under the canopy distorted my perception of the colours in my box of pastels, so I had to dash into the tack room every 20 minutes or so to check my work under a bright white strip light.  The moon hadn't risen, so I could only just see the horizon line.  The whole foreground was just black, so I'm glad I outlined the trees and fields earlier.  We look west across a valley, so most of the tree tops are below eye level, which makes for an interesting composition.  I had to use my imagination to add the fireworks, because there weren't any quite that close!  The moon didn't rise until I was packing up - but when it did, I waited a few minutes to watch the mist develop and spread along the valley bottom, which was magical. Here are my 2 paintings.  I prefer the one on the black MiTientes paper, but I'm not sure I'd frame either.  On this one, l added another 2 layers of chalk pastel over fixative to build up the colours, allowing some of the black background to show through.  The second one is on mixed media paper in my A3 Daler Rowney pad, which had quite a lot of tooth.  I added one more layer of charcoal and chalk pastels, fixed it and then used oil pastels to add more definition.  I quite like the colour over monochrome effect - but the paper started to feel damp and a bit limp after a couple of hours outside.  I think this approach might have worked better on a smoother surface like mount board.   I really enjoyed the whole exercise, and the horses remained calm and enjoyed my company.