Paint the Night!

So my boss's name is Miss Karen (I'd say her name is Karen Yother, but I call her Miss Karen so much more often than Karen Yother lol), and her dad's name is Donnel (for some reason we call him that instead of Don. Maybe we're just weird here hehe). In addition to being my boss's dad, he is also a local artist that just did a program for me.

Basically, we bought each participant a 9x12" canvas board, and had some acrylic paint on hand. We laid down some newspaper on the tables, passed out a small paint pallet (a paper plate works just as well if you can't find them at the dollar store), and gave everyone an inch brush and a detail brush. Donnel took the group step by step through painting a great looking night scene (we figured with a theme like "Own the Night," a night scene was awfully appropriate. The above image is a painting he did that gave him the idea for the night scene that we did).

I'm going to post some step by step pictures of the process, but I'm not saying I could paint it based on the pictures. I'm saying that having Donnel was awesome!

Our Tools

 A pencil gave us a Moon and a horizon line. 

We put some gesso putty in the moon which we'll use later.

We double loaded our brush (put one color on one side, and another color on the other side) and then brushed back and forth. The top was black and purple, we then blended in some blue near the horizon line, and then we used some green and brown for the ground. The trick is to put both colors directly on your brush and then just mix them as you paint back and forth. Gives you a great blended look.

 If you put some white paint on a toothbrush and flick it with your finger, you get some great looking stars in the sky.

Then we took our fingers and scratched the paint off of the top of the putty. That way we can see our moon again.

We added some trees (some black and mostly brown), and some purple, black, and green for the leaves. All that was left was initializing the bottom and taking a picture with a frame! 

Thanks Donnel!