"Night in the Woods" by Wilton Nelson

From the Artist: This will never be one of my favorite works, but it was interesting trying to paint a night time scene. I took several photos of my back garden with a bright moon (night skies are usually clear here in Florida and moon light makes it almost like day) to better visualize what Whistler saw.

All the colors used were blues, Prussian blue and ultramarine blue with some titanium white. The piece is supposed to represent a forested hillside next to a lake with the moon coming up.

I considered washing it all with a misty white, but figured that would lighten it up to much. The plan is to gesso the canvas after reading any comments.

From the Painting Guide: You shouldn't have resisted the temptation to go over it with a misty white, that would knock back the intensity of the colors. The problem with this painting in terms of the Whistler project isn't the range of tones, it's the saturation or intensity of the color. It's too intense for a Whistler-style nocturne painting, the colors need to be more subdued.

The top left photo is your original painting and top right is it converted into grayscale. The bottom left photo is the painting altered in a photo-editing program to reduce the saturation, and bottom right is this altered photo converted into grayscale. The two color photos look quite different, yet the two grayscale photos are quite similar. The range of grays doesn't extend into extreme darks, it's the saturation that's the problem. So before you gesso over it, first splash some thin titanium white over it and see the effect.