Painting Process: The Sun and The Moon

Recent portraits of the sun and the moon

There is a show at a local gallery focused solely on fantasy art called Lore. And if you know my work, you know I don’t really do fantasy art. I do landscape almost exclusively. But I attended the opening of the first Lore show last year and decided I would be a part of it someday. So when a call for submissions came around this year for the same show in 2026, I had a conundrum in trying to decide what to paint. I think someday I would like to do bigger, fantasy landscape pieces but this year was not that (time to get working on that now though!)

Of particular interest to me is the personification of natural elements. Whether in mythology like with Apollo and Artemis, or just anthropomorphism in general, like giving a personality or human character to mountains or cities or things like that. It is fun to think about, and also a fun way to try and use symbolic imagery to communicate a specific idea without words. So I decided to go with that idea on two smaller panels I got from Trekell, and to use very limited palettes to carry a particular mood through the paintings.

I would say my main motivation, besides painting something I could submit to a fantasy art show, was to experiment with limited palettes. That means limiting the pigments I used in painting each portrait to see what kind of color harmony I can come up with. The first portrait I started working on was of the sun, personified.

My palette that I used included my two cadmium pigments (Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red) because I wanted it to feel hot. Both of those pigments are very warm and together I knew the heat would come through. For a blue, I went with Viridian, which is actually a green paint, but for the same reason, I wanted as warm a blue as possible, and what is more warm than a blue with yellow mixed in? To be honest, I mostly relied on my mixtures of red and yellow, and viridian was used mostly as an accent color than a true part of the palette. That makes the resulting painting more monochromatic than anything else, but I think it worked for me, eventually.

This first painting actually took me forever. I spent hours and weeks on it. Partially my reference was to blame, but also I think trying to make the figure look like she was a source of light was extremely difficult, and I am not sure if I even achieved that. I actually “finished” the painting at least twice. After the first time I transitioned to the moon portrait and realized they didn’t fit together stylistically, and realized I needed to redo the sun, again.

In progress shot, and two iterations of my Sun painting. It was rough for a bit

Meanwhile, between iterations of The Sun, I started and finished my Moon painting in a single afternoon. The painting process was effortless and just worked so beautifully. The paint came off my brushes in the ways I wanted them to, and the ease of expressive color and light illusion just came together exactly how I had pictured it. Beginning to end, The Moon was a really great painting to work on, and reminded me just how much I love painting.

The limited palette I used for The Moon painting

Just like with The Sun, I wanted to use a limited palette to aid in my communication of the moonlit figure and the concept of the moon personified. That limited palette was Payne’s grey for my blue, yellow ochre for my yellow, and Alizarin crimson for my red. This particular palette is very muted, and definitely leans more purple/blue than the Sun’s yellow/red. I think this palette was perfect for what I was trying to communicate. It lent itself very easily to creating a moonlit feel. Since the moon itself doesn’t produce its own light, just reflects light coming from the sun, I wanted to convey that in both the mood and the pose of the model. I wanted the Moon character to feel mysterious as well as feeling the peace and serenity of the quiet of the night.

In progress shot and the finished painting of The Moon

After finishing the Moon, I was left with the conundrum of how to make my Sun painting fit. I revisited the reference I had made several times, until I had one that I felt really captured the mood and pose I was envisioning. In terms of what that was, I felt like first, I wanted the Sun to feel hot, glowing, and somewhat producing her own light. In addition, I wanted her character to feel powerful, but carefree. After a second finish as still not feeling good about it, I basically scraped off the entire painting and redid it a third time. This time, finally it felt like what I wanted it to be. Not perfect, but I felt more like the two portraits fit together. The extra texture from all the layered paint felt like it added to the chaos and feeling of intensity that I was hoping for.

The finished Sun painting

This whole project has been an interesting challenge and has taught me a few things. The first is that sometimes paintings go exactly how you want them to, and sometimes they don’t. You think I would know this by now, but I think it’s human nature to just want things to work out the way you want them to, you never really want things to be difficult. Especially if they are things that you have been doing for decades now. The other thing I learned applies specifically to painting, and that has to do with trying to create a cohesive look between two paintings. I wanted these two portraits to be stylistically and thematically connected and that was much harder to achieve than I expected it to be. I think a lot of the time I am a passive creator, meaning that I don’t necessarily come to each painting with a specific goal in mind, I just let the reference guide me. I’ll make choice on composition, color, etc. but that is mostly small detail oriented choices rather than something larger like concept or style. I had to constantly compare and contrast the two paintings and hope that through minute changes, they would become more obviously connected.

I’m excited to see these two paintings on the wall of a gallery! The show runs June 5-July 11 at the Compass gallery in Provo, Utah with an opening on June 5th, 6-9pm. I hope to see you there!