The Color of Light: An Artist's Blog

I naturally gravitate to painting seasonal scenes, and while winter is not my favorite time of year, I absolutely love painting snow. It really changes the rules of the painting game. Snow is often lighter than the sky (not so in most other situations), and it reflects so many surrounding colors that it offers a great way to bring color harmony into a piece. 

I like to think of painting snow as a if big blanket has been laid over the landscape. You still see all the undulations of the land and bits of the ground peeking through, but it's all covered by a beautiful multi-colored blanket. Similarly to dunes on a coastal scene, snow is made of crystal formations that reflect its surroundings. So while we may think of snow as white or blue, there are actually many colors in it. 

For this piece, my palette mainly consisted of the complementary colors of red and green. There is a lot of green in the snow, as well as some pink (a tint of red) and purple (a cooler leaning red which also contains blue). The sky has a lot of pink which is reflected on the ground. 

When I'm not in the mood to start an involved painting but want to keep up my painting practice, I'll usually work small and practice a specific element of painting. In this case I decided to work with value. I grabbed a sheet of unsanded Canson Mi-Tientes paper, which is inexpensive so I wouldn't feel like I was "committing" too much to the piece. Working small and on inexpensive paper helps keep me from feeling the piece is too precious that I don't want to experiment. 

It's always good to go back to basics and practice elements such as value, composition, line, shapes, color, etc. This piece helped me not only with seeing value but also reminded me how line work plays a role. I loved creating this sketchy looking little drawing with a lot of linear marks, instead of my usual broad side strokes that mass in areas.