Blood Moon - Denver Skyline

Blood Moon hitting the city at dusk, oil, 24x36

A couple of days after the Blood Moon rise a coworker showed me some photos on her phone. She and a photographer friend of hers had gone up to Lookout Mountain that evening to watch the moon rise. She initially showed me a photo with the moon in it, a big red orange ball in the evening sky. I really liked the photo and I asked her to ask her friend if I could possible use her image for a painting. She sent the original image along with another without the moon; shot earlier in the evening as the moon rose. The photographer was using her professional equipment that evening but I viewed them on an iPhone.

Image I thought I wanted to do of Blood Moon

After looking at the two images she sent me I decided I liked the orange light without the moon, so that is the one I ended up painting. I like them both and I may still end up doing the moon.  This skyline was not the 'piece of cake' I thought it would be. After I had it all done, I realized I had painted the skyline in a different manner from the rest of the landscape so it did not have an overall cohesive feel to it. I had to go back in and repaint the city so that it blended in texture wise with the rest. It was fun using orange and red in all the colors to unify the light. That was one of the most valuable lessons I think I ever learned; to use color in that manner. A blue green foreground has a lot of orange in it yet not as much as the middle ground so in relation to the middle ground, the foreground reads more blue green. Likewise, the sky has orange and red yet next to all the orange and yellow greens the sky looks more purple.