Capturing morning light in oil landscapes

The first hour is a moving target

Morning light is the most generous and the most impatient light you will ever paint. In midsummer on a south-facing common, the best of it can be gone in forty minutes. In late autumn, the same low, honeyed sun might hold for two hours, but it swings round the sky while you are mixing your third grey. The trick is to accept this from the outset: you are not painting a view, you are painting a moment, and the moment has an expiry time.

What that means in practice is that your decisions have to be front-loaded. Anything you can prepare before you leave the house is a minute stolen back from the light. Anything you defer until you are standing at the easel — palette layout, colour choices, composition — is a minute lost.

Prepare in the dark, paint in the light

Scout your spot the previous afternoon. Note where the sun will rise, which way the shadows will fall, whether there is somewhere to stand off the road, and whether a gate or a stile will be locked before six. Then work backwards.

• Load the palette the night before and cover it. A limited palette of five or six colours is plenty: titanium white, lemon yellow, yellow ochre, cadmium red, ultramarine, burnt sienna.
• Tape up small panels — 20 x 25 cm boards or 6 x 8 inch panels are ideal. Small panels force boldness and forgive it.
• Pack a head torch, kitchen roll, a wet panel carrier, and a flask. Cold hands mix muddy colour.
• Arrange the palette in the same order every single time, light to dark. After a few mornings you will reach for a colour without looking.

Arrive early enough to set up in near-darkness. The first mark should be made as the sky is just beginning to separate from the land.

Simplify before you mix anything

Squint hard. Most morning landscapes reduce to three shapes: the sky, the mass of trees or buildings, and the ground plane. Ask yourself two questions only. Where is the lightest light? Where is the darkest dark? Everything else is a variation on those two anchors.

Do a thumbnail first — two minutes, two greys and white, no detail. Then block in the whole panel thinly with turps or a rag, covering the surface within the first ten minutes. Getting rid of the white canvas early stops you treating it as a drawing and starts you treating it as a painting. Work big to small, and resist the urge to draw. Edges and shapes carry far more information than line.

Warm lights, cool shadows

Low sun travels through more atmosphere, so the light it throws is warm — orange, gold, sometimes nearly pink. Shadow areas receive almost no direct sun and are lit only by the cool blue of the sky. That is why morning shadows read violet, blue-grey and even green-blue, and it is the contrast between those two temperatures, not simply dark against light, that makes a landscape sing.

A few practical rules that hold up outdoors:

• Never darken with black. Mix shadow darks from ultramarine and burnt sienna, or ultramarine with a touch of alizarin, then add a scrap of warm colour so they do not go dead.
• Keep the brightest highlight for the very last stroke. White straight from the tube layered over wet paint will sink and grey off.
• Warm your highlights with a hint of lemon yellow or cadmium yellow; cool your mid-tone greens with a little cerulean rather than adding white, which chalkifies them.
• Watch the ground in shadow. It usually carries a warm bounce from surrounding sunlit surfaces, and that warmth is what stops shadows looking like holes.

Paint boldly, and leave the strokes alone

Use a brush one size larger than feels comfortable, load it properly, lay the stroke, and move on. Fiddling is the enemy of morning painting: every extra touch cools the paint, muddies the edge and eats a minute you cannot get back.

Keep hard edges where light strikes a form and soft edges where a form turns away. Set a timer for twenty minutes per pass and do not go back over a passage you have already resolved. If you lose your way, step back three metres, look at the thumbnail, and check whether your lightest light and darkest dark are still in the right places. They usually are not.

Stop when the light stops

The moment the shadows shorten and the temperature flattens, you are no longer painting what drew you there. Put the brush down. Finish the study from memory and from the notes you made at the start, not from the scene in front of you.

Before you pack up, write on the back of the panel: date, time, direction of the sun, and the colours that did the heavy lifting. Then repeat it tomorrow, at a different spot, on another small board. Ten morning studies will teach you more about light than ten months of working from photographs — and the discipline of finishing while the moment is still alive is the whole skill in miniature.