Diurnal nocturnal

I know I should be more consistent with this blogging thing to keep my tens of readers fascinated but I've been in a state of flux moving things around and stuff. I moved my computer to the studio which somehow screwed up my email on my iMac and my iPhone (do I get paid for mentioning Apple products? just curious) I've had a heck of a time getting that all fixed. We had our biannual opening at the studio last night and a tree fell on my house squashing my porch, and bending my roof all to hell, with water damage and the works. My homeowners insurance company (Universal of North America) rocks. They were on it like a... um.. like something that moves really fast. Oooops another product endorsement. Two days after a tree falls on my roof, the tree is cut up, lifted off and carted away. But I digress.... So the Wekiva paint out was a few weeks ago and great fun. Didn't sell much but they treated all the artists well and we had another fun artist reunion. I'll be posting several of the paintings but wanted to start with this 30x40. Yes it's a nocturne but no I didn't paint it on location at night... too big. And there could be bears or skunkapes. So I went out late in the day and did the sketch-in of the actual place in a sepia color, went to the mess hall where there was light and blocked in the base colors that night until about midnight. I used a study I had done previously of that scene as a nocturne to guide me but changed it a bunch. I've made many mental notes, all of which I've lost, about the color of things at night but remembered the key is to tone down all the variety of greens and browns to a narrow band and just paint the values... because it's dark at night. I went back the next morning and put in all the detail work. The clouds were from a previous day of shooting clouds with my iPhone (ahem) during the day but somehow had a night sky quality. It was sort of a piecemeal project but I wanted a big painting that if it didn't sell I could take to my gallery in Vero, Meghan Candler gallery, who has consistently sold larger paintings for me. I'm working on a whole new series for her right now, in fact.