The sun and the moon

Yesterday the sun was going in and out of the clouds and I wanted to have a back lighting (Contre-jour) painting. I drove for an hour and could not find a suitable view. I did find many views but they all had the sun behind me and I did not want to hold the umbrella for 3 hours.
Eventually I went to Iona Beach, which was quite a way from where I live. Even there I couldn't find a view with nice foreground, I ended up with this very minimalistic composition.

I had to wear the sunglasses the whole time until the sun dropped near the horizon and lost its intensity. I have painted with sunglasses on before and I don't find it too big a problem. Basically I mix paint as I see, so when I take the sunglasses off at the end it should be as though I painted without them. I did take them off intermittently to check the painting though. A side effect of staring into the sun was that when I looked at the painting I would see green dots all over almost the whole time. I didn't paint that effect into the painting, but Monet did (different effect).

I tried a few ways of painting the reflection on the water from the sun but couldn't get a good result. To flatten a such bright area into a narrow gamut of values from black to white was not trivial to me. When I went home I repainted the water based on how I remembered it and I am still not sure if it's the best solution.

February sun at 3:30pm - oil on panel - 8" x 12"

When I was done with it, the sun was near the horizon and the sunset colours were brilliant, but I didn't plan a sunset painting so I left the painting as it was. When I turned around to see how the landscape has changed over the hours, I couldn't believe my eyes: moon rise!  I had always wanted to paint a moon rise and I loved the colours. It was a fumble to set up the tripod because I knew it wouldn't last 5 minutes. I didn't even have time to find level ground, I was painting this with a half squat because my stool was about 45 degrees crooked.

Moon rise over Iona Beach - oil on panel - 9" x 12"

To paint quickly, I didn't have time to even key the sky first, I had to go straight to the clouds since they were changing the most, then the sky, then the moon, then the land. The order of process has its problem. Since the moon was the brightest thing there, it should be keyed first, since in painting I can only go as bright as white. The result was that the sky was in similar value as the moon. At home I took the sky down a shade so the moon would seem brighter. Also, below the horizon was too bright too. I blame it on not using the book light when painting. Look at the photos below, the lighting was pretty dimmed then. I painted under that condition, of course when viewed in bright day light the painting would seem too bright.

On going lessons:
-relative value, compare, compare, compare.
-use book light to paint if outdoor light gets dark.
-If there's no time to key the bright thing first, make sure the first thing I paint has proper value compared to that.