With permission, I took the task to explore a number of different settings in both daylight and darkness a bit
more abstractly.
I knew, I couldn‘t reproduce landscapes by drawing, so I concentrated on getting the right feeling and understanding
colour atmosphere.
I took quite a serious and organized approach and had a look at real locations as well as researched a lot of photos and compared both sources.
Depicting dark scenes naturally in a photo is a fine art as camera lenses are not nearly as adaptable as eyes are. Which makes them quite extraordinary and a blessing to have.
But it also means taking a dark scene to a screen requires some thinking.
Even cats cannot see if there is not a tiny source of light anywhere.
So, the colour mood of a scenery depends very much on the temperature that the light source has.
Of course, dark colours are dominating night scenes, but if the little we can see is due to the moon, a torch, passing cars, the bright numbers of an alarm clock in a room, a lamp-post or a candle has a huge impact on whether the colours shift towards blue/silver(/lilac) or brown/orange. Of course, also during daylight this question is of importance. But there we will generally have a broader colour range and higher contrast. Strong sources of light cast shadows, that help us to distinguish one object from the other. There are shadows in the dark as well, but they are not as easily silhouetted against the rest.
Instead, the difference in hue is much bigger between parts that are directly hit by light and those, which are lying in the dark completely.
As a slightly short-sighted person I know how much more difficult it is to cope with this during nighttime. Then, I often give in and wear my glasses, because I cannot tell things apart by colour and need to rely on clear outlines.
This leads me to the statement, that when creating dark scenes, an artist must pay high attention on strong poses and unmistakable shapes.
Eyes adapt to the dark. After a while of getting used to it, we can see much better. This also applies when we see a film in a darkened cinema room and must be taken into consideration when editing a film. Generally but, a film will try to mimick the view of an adapted eye on a scenery as we couldn‘t see very much otherwise.
Just to add this, the weather is also quite important for exterior settings of course as it interferes with the light sources. Rain and clouds can block the sunlight and therefore reduce the contrast or saturation of the colours in a scene. However, the moment when the sun comes out right after a rain shower is considered perfect for looking at colours, as the wet surfaces reflect much stronger.
