Midnight Queen

The third nocturne painting all titled with the word "Midnight", this one is all about the lighting with just a small but fairly bright moon within a relatively dark setting of moonlit woods with a subtly lit figure in the foreground. The model was the lovely Naomi Wood and is based on reference taken for a failed painting called "Naomi Gold". The picture is based around a blue/orange complementary colour axis using mixes of Kings Blue Light, Emerald Green, Indranthene Blue, Phthalocyanine Blue, Phthalocyanine Green, Ultramarine Violet, Lead Tin Yellow Lemon and Warm White (mostly Michael Harding paints) with Permanent Orange to modify the saturation. I painted the figure using warm shadows and cool highlights with modelling kept subtle to try and convey a moonlit figure. Compositionally it has a centrally placed figure and moon offset by asymmetrically placed trunks and branches and doesn't conform to my usual Rule Of Thirds way of composing a painting.
Oil on linen 20" x 16".
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.