How dark should a night/dark piece be?
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Hello fellow SVSers,
This is my current wip ( amongst many others lol ) trying to figure out the level of darkness to a piece. It doesn’t look as dark on my iPad but when I send it to my phone it’s much darker. Any thoughts? Also let me know what you think overall I’m trying to improve my compositions and make my art more interesting
Thank you for any advice given
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@ambiirae first, this looks like something out of a fairy tale. I would make it darker. If it’s digital, can you play with the brightness levels? To me it looks dawn/dusk.
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I always feel like colour choice matters more than brightness to give a sense of night. E.g. this image is super bright but it's definitely night time:
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Made a few minor adjustments to the ground work and where the hill meets the peak. It is supposed to be a bit fantasy that’s where I want to end up at some point not necessarily with this piece but any other critiques for me to edit?
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This looks really beautiful to me. I think if I imagine standing in this scene at night, my mind sees the lights from the fire as brighter and glowing more. From this distance it may be muted like you have painted - I don't really know - but if you haven't already, you could try looking up pictures of torches at night and seeing how much light they cast.
Really nice landscape. Thanks for sharing this one and the others you've posted previously.
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Hi @ambiirae, great piece!
Hope you don’t mind, but I added an adjustment layer to bring dark blues through and highlights on the flames to give you an idea for another approach on night lighting.
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HI @ambiirae, this looks really good! I love the mist and the feeling of remoteness. It’s really evocative.
I am by no means an expert, but you could look at creating more contrast. I’ve been looking at some paintings of night time scenes and, outside the focal area, objects are very dark and desaturated. Maybe think about where the light is coming from, how the light touches the objects around it and also how the sky is reflected in the water. (At the moment the river looks too blue I think.)
I took the liberty of upping the contrast on your image, darkening the edges and desaturating some areas to make the torches stand out. I hope that's ok. I wanted to see if I could evoke more of a feeling of night time.
If you’re an SVS member Will has a great class called "painting colour and light".
