Painting Sunsets: Two Secrets For How To Capture Them Accurately

(Get free painting tips and plein air painting techniques sent straight to your inbox or on my social media.)

Here is a demonstration of me painting a sunset in oils in the Peak District in England during one of my plein air painting workshops.

The Top Two Secrets for Painting Sunsets

There are two main secrets for painting sunsets:

• Control your values so that the sun is lighter in value than the surrounding sky. This is a problem because the color of the sun at sunset is orange, and orange is a fairly dark color. This means that you have to go darker on the background sky.
• To make the brilliant colors of a sunset stand out, you need to control the saturation of the background sky. You cannot get anywhere near the brilliance of the sun with paint, so you have to get the relative saturation correct between the sun and sunlit clouds and the background sky. This means in practice that you have to gray down the sky considerably.

These two tips will help when you are painting sunsets that will make them vibrant and exciting. If you want to learn a lot more about painting sunsets, you can study the advanced lesson: AD108 How To Paint A Sunset.

More Sunset Paintings

Here are some more examples of when I went painting sunsets en plein air:

Sunset Painting by Monet

This painting by Claude Monet is interesting because he only followed one of the principles I gave above. He did make the sun more saturated (the second principle), but he did not darken the background sky (the first principle) to make the sun lighter than its surroundings.

If you look at the black and white version of the painting this becomes more clear. In fact you can see that the monochrome version does not have the feeling of a sunset at all. This is because he did not darken the background sky, instead preferring to keep the painting high key.

He probably did this in order to maintain the notan structure of the painting. If he had gone darker on the surrounding sky, then the sky shape would be close in value to the foreground shape of the river bank and trees. For this reason he probably sacrificed some of the reality of the brilliance of the sun at sunset.

Whether this works of not is open to discussion. Having spent countless hours painting sunsets over the years, I find the dark orange sun in Monet’s painting a little unnatural, although it is still a beautiful painting. It works as a painting because of his beautiful notan design. as well as his attractive complementary color scheme.

This is the classic balancing act between Visual Music & Poetry^®.

• Visual Music: notan design and color harmony
• Visual Poetry: the moody feeling of a the last rays of the sun setting below the horizon

Here you can see that the sun is no lighter than its surroundings. In fact, when you convert the painting to black and white, the sun and its reflection completely disappears into the background, losing all the feeling of the sunset.

In Sunset Over Zhaosu Grass Plains below, you can see that I darkened the sky to capture the relative value of the brilliance of the sun more accurately. You can see that as a result, the value of the sky and of the land are now much closer together. It takes a lot of control over your colors to differentiate the values of the sky and the land when you do this.

Thank You

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you find it useful. If you would like to get free painting tips by email, please sign up for my free tips newsletter.

If you are interested in a structured approach for learning how to paint, take a look at my online painting classes.

Happy painting!

Barry John Raybould
Virtual Art Academy

What The Students Are Saying