Highschool night scene

While on an evening walk in Bolton Cilei and I went past the highschool and saw an interesting sunset with the eerie lights from the highschool interior shining through slots in the door. The sunset was actually more of a yellow-orange-blue but it came out darker in the painting because I mixed orange on the horizon with dark blue on the top of the sky. The outline for this painting was made on location, but I filled it in recently on our kitchen table (my indoor studio). The actual colours of a sunset are rather complex to paint despite me trying over the years. After a bit of research and colour analysis from photos I see that a sunset is orange-red to orange to yellow at the base, and blue high in the sky. The hard part is what is in between the yellow and blue... its a gradation of desaturated (greyish) yellow, really desaturated chartreuse, green, cyan then to the blue. I'm not sure how to paint that exactly but next time there is a sunset I'll give it a try. One good example I did last year was sunset over Montreal seen between two bridges.

Highschool night scene, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, August 2023 (No. 3523b)