northern nights & bright lights sketches

Up north here, there are times of the year when the nights are full of bright colours that dance and sing across the sky! A couple of decades ago I saw the aurora borealis (northern lights) when I had no idea they existed and had no idea what I was seeing.  It was a sleepless night, I looked out the bedroom window that faces north and the sky looked weird.  I got my camera (which was not much of a camera) stepped out my front door to capture a photo but no luck.  One of the news stories the next morning was the show the aurora borealis put on that night.  That's when I learned what that weird sky was!  

While searching for night time scenery tutorials to sketch, I came upon numerous videos for rendering the aurora borealis and also for galaxy sketching. The majority of the projects are completed on black paper, which I now need to buy.  I used white and toned tan paper.

This is my first try at sketching a galaxy from a tutorial.  It is done with prisma coloured pencils and a while gel pen on toned tan paper that measures 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches.  After the shades were laid, I blended them with a blending stump.  I don't have a full set of prismas so used what I had and came up with my own variation of colours.

I used goldfaber pencils for this night time scene of the northern lights. The white trim and stars are done with a gel pen.  It is also completed on the toned tan paper.  The tutorial for this used prisma pencils so I did the best I could with matching my goldfaber pencils.  

The supplies for this lesson were Faber-Castell polychromo pencils, white gel pen and white paper all  of which I have except my pencils are Faber-Castell goldfaber.  Instead of using a black pencil for the rocks, boat and mountains, I used india ink.  The page measures seven inches by ten inches. 

As I began this project, I had the feeling I bit of more than I could chew.  The tutorial uses pastels on black paper  but I used goldfaber pencils on white mixed media paper and india ink for the trees, hill and bear.  I worked on the aurora borealis starting with the lighter colours then moving towards the darker shades.  I used a colour scheme of my own but followed the shape from the tutorial.  I did not care for how it was progressing but decided to carry on and use it as a practice sheet.  It took many many many layers, the more I laid, the more I liked the look.  When I began adding the dark blue and the black around the bright colours, the project popped and I was now committed to making it a real thing and not a practice sheet.  This is a keeper and the page will stay in my book!   

The purposed of this project was to learn about pointillism which is the technique of placing small dots in a pattern to form an image.  I picked a lesson that was basic for the pointillism.  This tutorial fit the bill for that, yet it included a water-colour night sky filled with aurora borealis whereas I used coloured pencils for that.  The pointillism in this project is done with india ink.  Using india ink made for easy work but pointillism is typically done with paint or pencils.   This is a technique I would like to experiment with, maybe!