Moonlight Scenery

[tstellma]

It is night and it is cloud covered. The moon is shining through a gap in the cloud cover so some trees and cabins cast shadows. In the foreground there is a ditch with flowing water, in the middleground there is a frozen lake and a village with church and castle.
It is painted in oil on canvas, 40x70 cm.

I think, I should darken the snow.
What do you think?
Thanks in advance.

[oldradagast]

The snow probably should be darkened a bit, but there can be some artistic license with night scenes since the colors and values need to be adjusted a bit to make them more interesting.

You've got a lot of neat stuff going on in this painting. One trick with night scenes to make them work better is to leave some details "lost" in shadows or otherwise not as fully visible. Maybe one can only see part of a tree against the sky, or the highlights on a cabin, but the rest of it is shadowed.

It really depends upon how far you want to go with it and the trade-off between realism and a feeling that you may be creating. For example, a lot of Christmas cards have rather brightly illuminated night scenes much like this one; there's nothing wrong with that, but the feeling of the holidays is light amid the darkness, which comes before the realism in those cases.

Whatever you decide to do, this is a nice painting of a beautiful snowy night.

[Esmeralinda]

Matthew has good ideas !

I like your winter moonlight scene, it makes me eager for the first snow fall
Personally, I would darken the snow

[jmax]

I really love the way you get the mountains to sit into the painting. That bit of
wizardry is a keeper in your bag of painting skills to be sure. The snow i find
is great ... what is a bit of a problem is that the buildings and the trees
don't sit "into" the painting as well as the mountains.

Personal opinion only of course, I would try putting the image thru photoshop
and masking out the buildings and the trees to see if it makes any difference.
Or perhaps some of the trees and all of the buildings ... I think those trees are
the wrong temperature really.

With the photoshop process, just put back in one element at a time to see if
you can discover when it became a little cluttered.

The mountains and the snow tho are wonderful.

[tstellma]

Thank you very much for your replies which might help me.
So I had produced kind of chrismas card cluttered with little tiny things. Something like kitsch?
Anyway, I think, I have to reduce the importance of some things or I have to take them out. Also I will summarize some forms.
The draining ditch of the lake might be too straight.
And the colors do not always match a night scene, especially in the foreground?