Night lights purple grey sky

Its not often a week goes by without any painting, so I went out back and made a quick one of night lights with a purple-grey sky. Of course, the sky mixture is indo blue (PB60) and pyrol orange (PO73), which is an incredible mix for making mauve, taupe, dark orange, purple, dark blue. If you are a watercolour painter I highly recommend the mix, especially for night skies. I first discovered the mix doing a location painting in winter, called Pizza Welat Nocturne, and have used it ever since. Even during the day, its a good mix for cool purple-grey, and with a dab of raw sienna makes for a nice cloud colour. A great example of that is one of my personal all time favorite paintings, Cloud over Tranholme park. Another good mix is indo blue with burnt yellow ochre (PR102) which goes into a more charcoal, dark brown appearance, or burnt yellow ochre plus black (PBk6) which I used in the painting above to make the wall on the left. And the dark tree is perylene green (PBk31) with black. It took me some time to work out the best mixes for night painting, and with the sun going down close to 4PM these days I had better get used to it again!

Night lights purple grey sky, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, November 2026