Summer Moonrise

On By jonathankeeton

This is a scene from last summer; I was walking the dogs towards sunset and looked over as the moon rose over a hill. Something was really arresting to me about the full moon rising with the evening clouds. Here’s the phases the painting went through:

I started with a traditional primatura of a dark lavender gray. Then I sketched in the basic scene using markers.
The marker sketch gave me enough confidence to loosely paint the scene. For the foreground trees, which are crazy complicated, I thinned the paint so I could still see the dark shadow indications.
Now the scene is roughly laid out in oils. Everything is kind of right, but nothing is actually right, and everything will get covered over!
I worked quite a bit on the foreground, and about this time I realized that I had a ton of work to do on the sky.
Here the sky has been repainted. I needed to emphasize the light cerulean in the middle of the sky behind the moon, and then would need to rework the clouds and feather them into that sky.
Here is the final painting, with reworked clouds and general clean up and refinement here and there. This went to a dear friend in Michigan.

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