There are no size restrictions for this assignment. Keep with the theme of Alice in wonderland and your take on it.
Below are some suggestions for painting night scenes.
1. The best nights to paint are brightly lit by a full moon (or close to it), providing artists with the contrasts of light and shadow (and reflecting lights bouncing around in the shadows!), which make for the most dynamic paintings.
2. Tone value range is more limited in moonlight than it is in sunlight. The brightest lights will always be a couple values down from white.
3. Moonlight is much cooler than sunlight, often lending a blue or silvery-green hue to everything in your scene (unless it's impacted by another artificial light source, such as light from a building, a campfire, or streetlights).
4. The more elusive silvery-green range can be found by mixing the same two colours – Pthalo Turquoise and Alizarin Crimson – with Cadmium Yellow Deep. Again, modify this mixture with white to get the right tone values. You will notice that these three colors are a triad on the colour wheel, representing Blue-Green, Red-Purple, and Yellow-Orange.
5. Look for opportunities to use your complements: For example, if the scene has a lot of Blue-Green in it, look for hints of Red-Orange (or places where you can use your artistic license to add in the appropriate complementary colours). These complements can be subtle: they don't need to necessarily be obvious, or shout. They can be elusive whispers, and still impact the eye of the viewer.
6. Red is probably the most under-used colour on many artists' palettes, and the most frequently overlooked, but once you start looking for it you'll find it's amazing how much red there is in almost everything (in both sunlight and moonlight). When we consider the three primary colours, Yellow is warm, Blue is cool, and Red is a modifier. Red will make warm colours cooler, and cool colours warmer. The trick is in using the right red at the right time. A good general rule is to use bright warm reds like Cadmium Reds in daytime scenes, and cooler reds like Alizarin and Violet in nighttime scenes, but as with all rules there will be times to break it!
7. Just as with daytime scenes, the general rule for nocturne's is that warm colors come forward, while cool colors recede. There are times when this rule is broken, so when in doubt trust what you see; not what you think.
8. To create the glow on the sky's horizon in a nocturne (as you might see shortly after the sun has set, or a little while before it rises again), mix some of the silvery-green the bottom of the sky.
9. The lightest whites will always be closest to you, and in a night scene will quickly recede down the tone value scale as they get further away. Light tone value elements in your painting (like snow, pale sand, or white buildings) will also be heavily influenced by the silvery-green color cast from the moonlight.
10. Quite often a good daylight photograph can be painted as a nocturne by swapping the sunlight color scheme for that of moonlight.
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