Sunset Silhouettes – The 52-Week Art Project 2026

Welcome to week 32 of the 52-Week Art Project! This week’s prompt is Sunset Silhouettes. Don’t forget you have the whole week to add your sunset silhouettes to the gallery too! Today I’m sharing my creations for this prompt and talking a bit about my thoughts behind each piece. I’ll also explain the techniques and supplies I used. I hope these posts are informative and interesting and that maybe they will inspire you to have a go and get creative too!

The #CH52art Project Overview

• A creative project or those of us who can’t create daily, for whatever reason.
• There is 1 prompt per week to ​interpret in any way & take your time with.
• Use any medium (collage, clay, paint, photography, baking, knitting, lego, fabric, etc)
• You can skip a prompt anytime if needed, your wellbeing comes first. No stress here.
• You don’t need social media to participate, but if you share online, please use #CH52art
• Share your creations to the gallery on my blog (optional) & be inspired by other creatives.

Visit this page for more details.

I aim to post my creations at the start of the week, by Sunday evening or Monday morning. So I’m creating my pieces for each prompt one week in advance, maybe my interpretations can help or inspire others with theirs. That said, the gallery is always available, so you can browse or, if you’re participating, upload your creations, anytime.

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Wk32 Prompt: Sunset Silhouettes

I really love this week’s prompt! This is one of the subjects I enjoyed painting when I first picked up a powdery old watercolour set back in 2015. I love the contrast of vibrant colours in the background and a the dark silhouettes on top. You also don’t need to focus too much on details.

I used to paint a lot of landscapes, mountains, forests, and such, so this time I wanted to try different things. Many of which I’d never attempted to paint or draw before. I actually love how this page turned out!

Please excuse any dull lighting on some of the photos. I work in low light as bright lighting drains my energy (light sensitivity is an ME/CFS symptom). So progress pictures are often taken in low artificial lighting. I’ll try to correct the greyish colouring, get them as close to their actual colouring as I can, prior to posting.

* click on images to zoom in.

First: Cleaning My Paint Pallette

I started this week with a super messy pallette. I’d done a lot of colour mixing for last week’s “under the sea” painting and my pallette was looking very moody. I needed to clean it up so I could mix new, brighter sunset colours. Or so I had planned…

As I’ve said before, I hate wasting pigments, so I don’t ever wash my pallettes. That’s the beauty of gouache. I simply rehydrate the pigments on the pallete with water and a paintbrush. Then I use that brush to paint some backgrounds or shapes on as many pages as it takes to get the pallette relatively clean.

What I’m left with is a stack of pages, coloured and ready to use as backdrops for future art. I just keep them at my art desk and flip through them whenever I want to draw or paint, to see if anything inspires me. As an example, this beautiful piece was created that way. It went from pale and flat to highly detailed and striking. One of my favourites!

I ended up painting various pages in my A5 art journal as well as some A4 pages and watercolour paper. The art journal has a mix of paper weights in it, so some pages took the watery washes better than others, but I’ll still use them all. I quite like the crinkly, water-warped pages in a journal.

Note: Those thinner 120gsm pages are great for ink drawings like my zen-doodles or this floral piece. Using 300gsm watercolour paper or mixed media paper is way better for gouache paintings.

What Cleaning My Paint Pallette Taught Me

I managed to empty a couple of wells in the pallette. Apparently I use a lot of yellow. I think it’s mainly to mix various shades of green or oranges for flowers because I don’t have that much yellow art.

Looking more closely, the yellow, viridian (dark green), magenta and blues seem to be my most used colours. Those are the primaries, plus green. So I’ve realised recently that I actually mix my own colours more than using the premixed shades that came in the set.

You can see, in the above photos, the primary red that was included in the set is hardly used. It just doesn’t mix bright and vibrant colours like the magenta does. The magenta was not part of the set, I bought that separately and it’s my favourite colour for mixing.

Let’s see what I ended up painting this week!

Blossom Tree And Two Birds

The first silhouette I painted this week, was this blossom tree branch with 2 little birds. You can see how the thinner 120gsm paper crinkles and buckles with water.

I could have cut some thicker 200gsm pages to use instead, but I didn’t feel like it. I was enjoying just colouring everything in proximity and didn’t really want to go measuring and cutting fresh pages for the journal in that moment.

For context: the heatwaves here in France have been intense, they drain me of so much energy. Sitting still in front of the fan with my paints seemed much less troublesome than rummaging through art supplies in the other room without a fan!

Creating The Backgrounds – Gouache And Watercolour Shimmer

One of the other pages I had cleaned my pallette on ended up inspiring this week’s art. I was initially planning on mixing fresh, bright sunset colours for the silhouettes, but ended up liking this page for them instead. Again, not the ideal paper for waterbased pigments, but usable.

These colours reminded me of growing up in Africa. All those warm tones. Wow. So I decided I’d paint small silhouettes this week, one in each shape.

Before starting with the black silhouettes, though, I had an idea I wanted to try. I have a gorgeous set of juicy Japanese watercolours. They’re super shiny and shimmery, and I thought they’d work well to create a bit of a golden glow on these tiny scenes.

There are different shades of gold in this set, from red gold, to yellow and blue gold to white gold. So of course I tried to match the shades of gold to the colours of the various shapes. Being watercolour, I could have mixed them with the gouache colours to match them better, but my pallette was now clean and I was not about to mix the same colours in there again.

Painting Silhouettes – Japanese Sumi (Ink)

I use a lot of black in my art, I’m sure my regular viewers will have noticed, I like the contrast. But what you might not know is that I don’t often touch the black gouache. I’m usually using black ink. I find it gives a much more opaque finish as it’s already liquid and highly pigmented, while I need to rehydrate my black gouache with water, so it ends up being translucent.

That’s my fault though, I added the black to my dry gouache pallette. In the future I’ll try using black gouache straight from the tube to see how that works. Though I think it will still be too thick for how I like to use it and I’d want to water it down to get smoother working consistency. Ink is probably just better for line work.

For this week’s piece, I used Sumi, which is a highly pigmented liquid ink most commonly used for calligraphy and traditional Japanese art.

I started with a tree branch, similar to the first painting above. I really enjoyed this motif and will likely be playing around with more tree silhouettes in the future.

Then in the silvery rectangle I painted a mountain lake scene. The white gold really reminded me of the moon reflecting off an icy lake.

Next, I wanted to draw a bird in the tall rectangle. A crane came to mind, something I saw often in Africa. This was my first time painting one of those. I think it’s recognisable.

After that, I wanted to try something else I’d never painted before: bamboo. I liked the idea of putting them in the round shape, kind of like the round windows you see in Japanese architecture and gardens. I’ll probably be painting more bamboo in the future too, it was fun!

Then I painted a palm leaf on the opposite side of the page. This is a shape I paint frequently. Next was something that had inspired this whole piece to begin with: the African Bushveld at sunset. I attempted my first giraffe. I think it’s cute.

From the Bushveld to the seaside, next I painted a sailboat. Again reminded by the light of the full moon creating shadows on the water, this scene reminds me of summer holidays in Italy.

Then I tried another first: a squirrel! I struggled to get the proportions right, but this is the advantage of painting silhouettes, they’re easy to adjust and reshape, since you don’t have random details that end up in the wrong place if you move things around, make the head bigger, etc. This little guy reminds me of England, specifically the Lake District where my parents used to live.

In the last tall rectangle I wanted to create some sort of city scene, so, staying in England, the intricate street lights in London came to mind. Not sure if that’s a true London lamp design, but close enough. I’d enjoy painting more of those too.

Down to the last two spaces! First I painted a little neighbourhood with houses, apartments and a swing set in a park which then led me to a wildflower meadow for the final shape. In the end I think this page looks like a gallery wall with multiple pieces of unrelated art. I quite like it!

Each shape was painted and completed fully before moving on to the next one. So on some I have painted a border with the shimmery gold, some have Sumi ink borders and some have fineliner frames. A few were left unframed.

One thing I’d do differently next time I use the shimmery Japanese watercolours, is to add them after the Sumi ink. The ink allows the shimmer to peek through, so those areas are not as intensely black as I’d like. This is especially visible on the boat picture.

The ink is water resistent once dried, so there should be no issues going over it with watercolour, if I do want the shimmer over the top of the black in future pieces. Something to try.

For now I just painted multiple layers of ink over the shimmery bits to make the black more intense. Except on the boat, I left the shimmer to come through. I think it gives the sails a lighter grey colouring in contrast to the solid black of the boat itself.

What do you think of this piece? Which scene is your favourite?

Would You Like To Participate?

If you’d like to join us, you can hop in anytime you like. It’s a low stress project, so you can go at your own pace. Being chronically ill means sometimes I can make 3 pieces of art in a week and other times I will struggle to make one. There’s no pressure here. Life happens.

Next Prompt, Wk33: Mosaic

I’m super excited for this one and cannot wait to see how our participants interpret this prompt! You can upload an image of your creations to the gallery using the button below, or just browse here:

The #CH52art Summer Gallery 2026

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