MASTERING SUNSETS with Richard Robinson
Hi, I'm Richard Robinson.
We are in New Zealand which is arguably the first country in the world to see the sunrise of each new day.
So it's also the first to see each new sunset.
We all love sunsets, but as artists, sunsets are particularly beautiful because
they inspire us to actually do something about all of this beauty.
The inspire us to paint them.
Anybody that can pick up a brush can paint a sunset,
but how do we paint a sunset really well? That's what we're going to find out in this course.
We are going to paint a number of sunsets, starting off really quite simply and getting more and more complex
as you learn new skills and you start to play with new ideas.
The best way to learn something, is to do that thing. Right?
We all know that, so it's great if you want to watch the whole course right through to the end, but I encourage you
to come back here to the start of the course and get your paints out and do these projects one at a time.
And that way, by the end of it, you will be able to paint beautiful sunsets
that you are really proud of all by yourself.
The course doesn't start, as you might expect, by painting sunsets from life out here because that's
actually quite tricky, so I leave that right to the end of the course.
What I do find, is that you're always able to paint something much better,
once you understand why that thing looks like that thing does.
So, let's get started by having a look at how sunsets work.
Mastering Sunsets CHAPTER 2 "Sunset Physics".
The sun sends us white light comprised of all the colors of the spectrum.
When that light hits the Earth's atmosphere, it gets scattered a little by the moisture in the air.
Longer wave lengths of light like orange and red, don't get scattered so much by the atmosphere.
So the more atmosphere the white light has to go through to get to our eyes, the redder the light becomes.
Sometimes, dust and pollution in the atmosphere increase the effect, making the light even more red.
In Hawaii, for instance, the volcano there often puts out so much smog or "vog"
that you end up with very beautiful sunsets.
You can think of our atmosphere as being like the peel of an orange.
Light coming straight down to us at mid-day, has the least atmosphere to get through.
The light slicing through the atmosphere at sunset has about ten times more atmosphere to get through
than at mid-day which increases the scattering of short wave lengths and leaves
more red and orange wave lengths to get to us.
In actual fact, the air is really a lot thinner than we all imagine.
And an orange is a poor example. An apple is actually much closer to the truth.
If the earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere which keeps everything here alive,
would only be the thickness of the apple skin.
It gives you a good sense as to how precious our atmosphere really is.
The atmosphere gets thinner the higher up you go which means
the light gradually gets whiter up there because there's less filtering going on.
You can sometimes see the effect of this on tall clouds and mountains
as a gradation of colour from orange to yellow to white.
There's also, occasionally, a grey layer that creeps up from the eastern horizon.
This is actually the shadow of the earth being projected into the atmosphere.
Like me, you might find the sunset light effects in the east just as beautiful as those in the west.
So it pays to look behind you when you are facing a beautiful sunset.
This painting of my son, Luke, headed down to a beach,
is something of a montage of two sunset lighting effects.
The foreground is lit from the front, the west while the sky displays more the effects of a sunrise in the east.
So you can have your cake and eat it too.
It's something of a cheat, but it solves the tendency for loss of foreground color in a backlit situation.
In the next chapter, we will learn the colour lingo we will use to make it
easier for you to learn about painting beautiful sunsets.