Winter Watercolors

I love this time of year, with the brilliant sun on the blue-white snow.   Here’s a photo from my ski outing last week:

I liked it so much I decided to paint it.

I enjoy painting winter scenes, because basicially, I’m lazy.    Since the scene is mostly snow, you really dont’ really have to paint that much, you can leave a lot of the sheet blank.  The only downside is, that whatever you do paint, really has to count and be just right, because you can’t hide your mistakes.  

Notice I took some artistic license with the painting.     For one thing, I left out the grey cloud near the horizon.  It wouldn’t have fit in well, it would have looked like a blob.   Plus,  the white paper by itself would have made the scene look harsh.  So I added some cadmium yellow and yellow orchre to the snow, to warm things up.   I also didn’t try to paint every branch or twig, or it would have looked like a fuster-cluck.

I think I only used 7-8 different colors for this painting.  Cadmium yellow, yellow orchre,  Van Dyke brown, a few umbers, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue and Paynes Grey.

I used a knife blade to scrape the paper on trees on the left, to highlight them.   I had to hold my breath when I did this, because essentially it’s damaging the paper.   If you get it wrong, there’s no going back and you can ruin the whole painting.

Luckily I don’t think I did.  

 

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Tags: art, artwork, original water color, winter landscape

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