Morning Light

An Art Teacher's Guide to Painting Sunrises

All Photos and Paintings courtesy of Karen Grace

It is late October here in Stockholm, Sweden and every day that passes the night takes over a little more of our lives.  Darkness is coming. It’s not a bad thing really, but it can feel a little oppressive if you let it.  You have to look for the light.  To tell the truth, one of the things I love about the darker half of the year is that sunrises and sunsets are at easier times of the day and we get to enjoy them more.  Which is good – this is when we need them most.

I have always loved sunrises and sunsets (they are dramatic and beautiful and easy to love) but it was my children who taught me to properly appreciate them.  My instinctive grown-up answer to the darker days is just another cup of coffee, but I learned another way.  Once when my youngest was five he woke me at some ungodly hour and whispered in my ear, “Mama, I want to paint the sunrise!”  He immediately had my attention!  In my many years as an artist and teacher I’d never thought of that!  So, the little buddha and I held hands as we padded quietly to the kitchen and looked at the pre-dawn sky.  He helped me set out paper, brushes, water, and paint at the kitchen table. Then we enjoyed a magical thirty minutes or so of silently painting together as he diligently filled up every centimeter of the paper with the blues and purples in the sky and the shadowy black trees before us.  Neither of us wanted to stop but eventually the sun came up, the spell was broken, and it was time to get ready for school anyway.  The next day he wanted to do it again, and then again, and it became a sweet little morning ritual.  I can’t remember how long it lasted (only a week or two really) but it comes back every now and then.  In the dark days I hearken back to this magic, with or without pajama-clad company.

So, let me help you conjure the spell my son taught me.  The trickiest parts about painting a sunrise are the fickleness of the sky itself and having your supplies all ready to go for the moment an opportunity arrives.  The rest is child’s play!  I have zero strategies for making a beautiful sunrise appear on command but I can offer some thoughts on appreciating whatever shows up.  Start by making it a point to look out the window each morning and see what’s happening out there.  Completely cloudy and rainy days can be harder to enjoy, but it’s amazing what you will notice when you tune your attention in a particular direction.  Even a gray dawn offers all the promise of a new day.  A sunrise can be a very minimalist affair or sometimes they have more of a Jackson Pollock look to them, but there is always something going on.  And it’s always changing as the sun keeps on moving through its morning stretch across the sky.

The supplies are not complicated at all.  You just need some proper watercolor paper – it’s thick stuff that holds up to the water – a box of watercolor paints, a paint brush (bigger is better) and a glass of water. I like to tape my paper down to the table or a tray with masking tape, but you don’t have to.  Gather your supplies and have them ready for a morning when your schedule and the sky happen to align.

So, let’s paint the sunrise, shall we?  Light a candle and set out your materials -notice all the textures as you arrange them – the roughness of the paper, the cool sheen of the metal case, the ripples in the water glass reflecting the light of your candle and the light of the sky.  Be still a moment, take three deep breaths, wrap your fingers around your warm mug, and watch the steam rise.  Greet your morning!  Stare out at the wonder of it – another new day.  Consider the colors in your sky.  How many different colors can you see?  Notice how the colors fade from one to the next or how the clouds offer blotches and stripes of something different.  A good way to start painting is to simply dip your brush in water and paint that all over the paper to get it wet and help the paint flow.  It also helps dispel the scary feeling of a blank canvas. Then take your wet brush, swirl it around in one paint pan a bit (perhaps blue first?) and then swish that around on the damp paper and watch it go. 

In the blue department, I like to use more than one so they mix and mingle, they tend to be more interesting together.  Consult your sky to see what colors you should progress to next.  Is it gold, or orange?  Hot magenta or shadowy purple?  Let the sky be your guide and don’t argue with it too much.  The paint box offers easy starting points but also try out mixing the colors up a bit.  You can mix hues in the lid of your box or feel free to push the colors around on the paper with your brush to blend them and make new shades. Watercolor works best when you nudge it gently in the direction you’d like it to go instead of trying to tightly confine and direct it.  It’s best to go gently at the start and add more as you go – as it’s hard to take color away once it’s on the paper.  You can also remove color while it is still wet with a crumpled-up paper towel, which I find is a handy trick to reclaim some cloudy white blotches in a sky I’ve just covered in blue or orange.

Once your paper is filled with puddly swirls of color stand back and admire it a moment and blow out your candle.  The spell is broken and the sky no doubt looks very different from when you started.  It’s best to let it dry right where it sits as you go about your morning or even the rest of your day.  It will be waiting for you when you return to remind you of where you started.  You can go back into your painting later and add more but don’t overwork it – usually less is more here.  And besides, you’ll have another sunrise tomorrow, and you can begin again.

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