Exercise: Creating mood and atmosphere

We are asked to review previous paintings and consider how each subject could be handled differently to convey a different atmosphere altogether from the original.

I decided to re-work my painting of Bow Lane.  The original was a bright early morning scene, full of detail of the shops, passers-by, architectural detail and shop signs.  As a direct counterpoint to this, I choose to do the exact opposite; a dark, evening scene drizzling with rain.

As a starting point (and because it was impractical to wait until 10pm to catch the street in darkness in the summer!), I created a drawing of the scene and considered how different this would be in darkness.  The obvious difference is the change of focus; the daytime scene had a lot of detail on the sunlit side, including all the window frames and architectural detail.  An evening scene changes the focus to the bottom of the scene because the shop lights are the only ones left on all night.  Most of the architectural detail, except the very basic shapes of the buildings, is lost, as is the detail on the figures, putting them into silhouette.

The line drawing allowed me to focus on where the light would be coming from (shop windows, doorways, lamps and the strings of lights) and, from this, to judge where the reflected light and dark shadow areas would be.  Rain also diffuses the light and creates more reflections and highlights as the damp ground becomes a reflective surface.  From my line drawing I created a larger tonal drawing in charcoal, again considering where the strongest light sources would be, as well as cast shadows and reflective surfaces.

When it came to considering colour, the most difficult choice I faced was how to portray the light.  Artificial evening light is always more yellow/orange than daylight, especially street lights and frequently cast an almost sickly greenish/yellow glow on the surrounding areas.

I approached the painting in a very similar way to my original – I decided to keep the bright orange ground (magenta/yellow mix) both to give a brightness to the lightest areas of the painting and also to have a colour for the darker, blue tones to work against.  I considered using a darker blue/purple ground but decided that this would just be too dark and I would struggle with applying the lighter colours on top of it.  Streaked, thick acrylic created the buildings, followed by an application of pale yellow (with the addition of white for opacity) for the windows/doors to create the necessary brightness.  The light areas were applied thickly with mixtures of orange, yellow and white for variation.  The figures were painted in solid black silhouettes with green/yellow edges caused by the cast light.

The paving was the most complex challenge here – the combination of a wet surface, light from the buildings and the overhead strings of light I found to be very challenging, especially as I did not have any actual visual information to work from.  Because of this, I decided to very loosely apply a maroon colour over the orange (violet and burnt umber) which I felt would achieve the necessary darkness while giving the impression of light reflecting off the paving slabs combined with the glow from the lights.

Reviewing this piece, what I found most difficult was the combination of the absence of any colour references along with how to represent reflected light.  I feel it does give the stated aim of achieving a certain mood and atmosphere, but I did struggle with this.  I felt I wanted to add more detail (such as how light from the street lamps would have illuminated certain areas of architectural detail) but did not have the necessary information to do this.  I think I probably should have painted this a little smaller, which would have negated the need for further detail, but painting this large (almost A1) allowed me to use large brushes to achieve the loose feel.

I think it is possible to completely change an atmosphere in a painting but think this comes with experience (i.e. actually having painted an evening scene from either life or photos, studies, etc) to know how to approach a similar scene in a more informed manner.