Honouring our ancestors' links with nature and astronomy

With the lunar eclipse I was going to go back to using watercolours starting with the wet-on-wet painting technique for both the sky and the moon but there was one difference. I needed to have the moon against a dark blue-grey sky and most of the moon would be quite dark with the blood red moon colour. However, there was 5% that was not in shadow and I needed to keep that white while I did the rest of the sky and moon. So, before I started painting this I masked out certain areas.

If you have not heard of the term “masking out” before, let me briefly explain. If you are using oils or acrylic paints and you wanted something to be white, well you just let the first layer dry and you put white paint on top of it. You can’t do that with watercolours.

You have to plan things out in advance when using watercolours to ensure that you don’t paint something that you really want to keep white, or paint it a darker colour than you want it to be. Once you have painted something in watercolours you can never get it back to pure white again – unless you have masked it out.

This simply means painting on masking fluid anywhere that you want to keep white. Once it is dry, you can happily paint over the top of it and the paint can’t get to the paper. When the paint is dry, you gently rub the mask with your finger and it simply peels off to reveal the pure white, original paper underneath. That can now be left white or painted any colour that you want.

Having masked out the 5% of the moon that was not in shadow it also led me to think: what do you see in a night sky other than the moon? Stars! So, after masking out the area for the bright side of the moon, I merrily dabbed loads of tiny specs of masking fluid all over the sky to represent those celestial diamonds. I included a reference to Orion – the easiest constellation to identify – and the Seven Sisters which are just top right up from the hunter’s shoulder.

The masking fluid allowed me to paint over the entire sky area and when I was happy with it and it had dried, I could rub off the masks to reveal the light side of the moon and those bright white dots of stars which I could either leave white or add some level of colour.

As you can see from the finished picture, the dark blue-grey night sky and deep red of the 95% of the moon that was in shadow intensified the brightness of the 5% not eclipsed. It utilises what the genius Leonardo da Vinci called ‘chiaroscuro’ (Italian for light and dark) where placing the lightest lights next to the darkest darks creates the greatest contrasts in the viewer’s eye and gives the object a 3D effect.

Having planned all the elements in this painting to represent the lunar eclipse, I was still only halfway to creating the intended artwork. I still had to incorporate it being the Sturgeon Moon.

August’s full moon derived its name from the large numbers of the fish who, at this time of year, arose out of the murky depths of the great lakes of Canada and northeastern US to feed and breach the waters leaping towards the late summer skies. As these ancient fish (they can live for more than 200 years) grew to a substantial size, they were an important source of food for the native tribes. They, as a mark of thanks, named August’s moon in honour of the fish.

Sadly, the details about the fish’s abundance have to be written in past tense as overfishing, pollution and the caviar industry has brought most species to the brink of extinction. All the more reason to create an artwork that celebrates its heyday.

Although sturgeon can be either freshwater or marine, I was immediately creating a lake setting for it which allowed me to play with creating reflections of the eclipsed moon and I love painting water so win/win. They talk of the sturgeons breaching the water as they come up, but most people only think of salmon as leaping out of the water. Thus, I didn’t want to have fish jumping out of the lake and the resulting artwork being thought of as the salmon moon!

Although that idea didn’t work, I had one of those inexplicable thoughts whereby I knew that somehow I would come up with something to include a sturgeon in the final image and so I started painting.

Over the centuries our ancestors gave specific names to each full moon and not only were they delightful names they also show how closely they were in touch with nature and the changing seasons.

Unfortunately in this day and age most people will barely notice the fact that it is a full moon let alone consider what it is called or why. I think that’s such a shame because we miss that connection with the changing of the seasons as we go through the year.

That is one reason why I have started to create a collection of paintings depicting each of the full moons with their special names. The other reasons are that the names are often cute and intriguing; and they are a reminder of the appearances of different elements of the natural world around us and of the changing colours through the year. All in all, they really inspire me to bring them to life to tell some aspect of the story behind each month’s full moon name.

There’s also the added challenge of creating a coherent collection despite every one of the images being very different. The only commonality is the full moon which I am placing in roughly the same place each time – on the junction of the top horizontal third line and the right vertical third line.

Of course nothing is as simple as everyone agreeing with what a “thing” is called, including full moons, so there are often 2, 3 or even 4 names for each month’s full moon that have emerged over the centuries and in different cultures. Ultimately that could leave me creating a very large collection!

However, I am starting with one for each month and I’m picking my favourite of the 12 full moon names. Yes, yes, I can hear some people shouting back at me that sometimes there are 13 full moons in a year, and 2026 is one of those.

In May 2026 we had two full moons, the second of which is called a Blue Moon . . . hence the saying “Once in a Blue Moon” for something that only happens very occasionally. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t the original meaning behind a blue moon, and neither is the blue moon any more blue than the earlier full moon of that month or any other moon.

I’ll leave the accounts of other meanings behind blue moons for when I get round to painting my version of the Blue Moon. Today I want to show you one of my latest full moon pictures and tell you how and why I created it so you could use some of those techniques in your own artwork.

The last of my artworks that I spoke about which included the moon was the picture (below), drawn in soft pastels, of this year’s solar eclipse. It is currently on show at The Atkinson gallery in Southport in the Palette Club Invitation exhibition until November 28.

“Lunar eclipse in Sturgeon Moon, August 2026” now goes into my collection of full moon artworks.

It is also likely to go on public display at the SCA’s “Christmas Collection” exhibition. This runs from November 10th to December 23rd at their ArtHouse Gallery in Eastbank Street, Southport.

Painting the moon and sky wet-on-wet

Lunar eclipse needed to be 'masked out'

As it turned out, August was particularly special this year. Not only did we get the solar eclipse on the 12th, but 15 days later we had the Sturgeon full moon complete with a partial lunar eclipse.

I had already been inspired to create an artwork depicting the solar eclipse and the way it drew crowds of people together in an atmosphere of unity, so I couldn’t miss the chance to do the lunar eclipse as well.

Unlike my solar eclipse drawing depicting the total eclipse, this lunar eclipse was only a partial one but it was still around 95%. To capture that partial eclipse actually throws up totally different challenges than doing the total solar eclipse did.

The partial eclipse means there is a crescent of the bright light from the edge of the full moon that is not covered by the earth’s shadow while the part that is in shadow goes blood red. That’s why a total lunar eclipse is often referred to as a blood moon or blood red moon.

The two biggest technical differences between the solar eclipse artwork and the full moon paintings I have done so far is that the eclipse was drawn in soft pastels on black paper while the full moons have been painted in watercolours on white paper.

I loved the way that the pastels allowed me to create the light bursting out from the edges of the black eclipsed sun and landing softly on the edges of the crowds gathered below. On the other hand, a usual full moon is vividly illuminating the whole scene like a celestial spotlight so it is really bright in its own right. You can see what I mean in the examples below.

As with previous full moon paintings, I did the sky and the moon’s surface using mainly wet on wet watercolour technique. With this you wet the surface of the paper and then drop watercolour paint onto the wet surface and watch and play as the colour floods and flows around the paper. When you add different colours you get some bleeding into one another thus creating new colours and shades.

It is great fun and a method that keeps you on your toes as you don’t have total control over where the paints/colours are going or how much they will mix and blend. You can guide the colours a bit with a brush or by tilting the board, and it always depends on how much water you have on your paper, what its absorbency rate is and even how hot a day it is but that’s the fun of it all. You watch it develop and see where it will take you – you need to look at the sky and clouds in particular with your right brain, not your logical left, in order to work out what to leave, what to enhance, when to add more water or paint or take away some moisture.

I did an initial sky in wet-on-wet and when that was dry I did the red section of the moon using the same method. When they were dry both needed to be darker, especially the sky on the outside of the image and behind the dark side of the moon.

Underneath where the moon was not in shadow I wanted it to be a brightly lit sky typical of a full moon, so I kept a much paler, brighter version of the blue-grey sky in the rest of the picture.

Various iterations of sky and moon led to a reasonably satisfactory result but not something that I was delighted with. So I moved onto the water to see if the complete sky and reflections would be better.

I love painting water and I always do it with the words of my brilliant art school tutor ringing in my ears: “Water, unless it is going over a waterfall or weir or racing around rocks, is flat and wet so should be painted flat and wet.”

For many years my students have, in turn, painted water with me chanting that same mantra to them over and over again! It means that your brushstrokes are always horizontal never curved, diagonal or vertical no matter what the things are that you are creating reflections of or the direction of the water such as a river flowing diagonally across the image. You can see that in this close-up section of the moon and its reflection.

So, I had the sky, moon and reflections painted in and I had rejected the idea of using leaping fish or fishermen to represent the Sturgeon Moon. I looked at the sky and it didn't hit the mark. I had envisaged the dark sky and 95% eclipsed moon as contrasting vivIdly with the 5% moon in the light. In fact, the print out that I did to draw the big fisherman on (above right) came out with a stronger contrast than the actual painting and I thought how much the light section of the moon and sky needed to light up even more. Plus I still wanted a sturgeon fish of some form, while the scenery of the lake edge could do with a bit of life without anything taking away the attention from the eclipse.

The scenery in this painting was a typical lake edge with trees bordering the far water’s edge and a rocky outcrop on the left side midway across the lake - that was where I had tried out the small fisherman. When I enhanced the suggestion of a couple of buildings complete with revellers on the far side in a link back to the crowds depicted in the solar eclipse picture, the answer began to emerge.

I kept thinking back to that solar eclipse drawing and how I had applied the soft pastel to create the haze of vivid light without any edges or borders. That effect is much harder to achieve in paint than in pastels because of having to lose any signs of brushstrokes.

Then I thought back even further to when I did skyscapes using watercolour as a base and soft pastel to do the edges of wispy clouds such as this example below.

The effects of soft pastel in both these images were just what I needed to create the illusion of the bright moonlight streaming out from the non-shadowed area of the moon. So I got out my pastels and suddenly it was no longer a painting and instead became a mixed media artwork because pastels are a drawing medium not a painting one.

As you can see from the finished picture, I also used the pastels to good effect in the water ripples showing the reflection of the moon, especially the light side.

I also flicked pastels round the rocky island emerging from the water to create reflected moonlight bouncing off the front edges.

That is when the final piece fitted into place in the image: the link to the sturgeon moon and the idea of the fish rising to the top and leaping out of the water as they enjoy their summer feed. Look at the image with the right side of your brain . . . the rock looks like the face of a sturgeon fish!

Fishing around for inspiration

Time was running out and I still had to incorporate it being the Sturgeon Moon. I did play around with the idea of a fisherman catching sturgeon but I like to think of them coming up for their summer feed and heading back down into the lakes for yet another of their hundred plus years.

A tip for you: If you want to try out the addition of an item into a painting, especially a watercolour painting where it is nearly impossible to alter and remove something once it is painted, do what I did in this instance. Take a photograph of the painting to date, print out a copy and then try sketching or painting the object/person/thing on the print out. It will only be rough, but it gives you a good idea as to whether your idea will work.

You can see below that I tried a small fisherman on the rock on the left side of the painting, and found that it made the moon look enormous. In the second picture I made the fisherman in proportion with the moon as we would see it, but it didn't work. The focus was on the fisherman not the moon turning it in "Lunar Eclipse in Fishing Moon". I happily scrapped the idea and was thankful that I could go back to the painting without wondering how I could erase the figure from the scene.

Lancashire Artist of the Year 2024 Finalist