Deep Snow on Druid Hill Creek

February has been snowy, often gloomy too. By this writing snow from plowing streets has gotten high at corners, sometimes high enough that you can't see cross traffic all that well. The snow here on Druid Hill Creek has been beautiful and amazingly changeable. A deep snow from two weeks ago melted almost completely in response to a few days of 40 degree temperatures. But the total snowfall has piled up relentlessly.

The month began without much snow on the ground, but before the first week was over we had several inches of accumulation. Druid Hill Creek looked forbidding and bleak in the diffuse light. The gloom was bad enough it seemed like the "dead of winter," as I scribbled on the sketch. This was the view (above) from one of my studio windows, downstream. The page was prepped with an olive colored wash of acryla gouache, so there is beading and patterning of the first dark watercolor passages.

The snow didn't melt--it never got that warm--but the ice and snow cover did shrink, probably by a process called sublimation. Anyway, it didn't abate completely and by Valentine's day even more snow had fallen. At least the sky had cleared. The brilliant sun on distant trees and snowy shadows were fun to sketch that day in one of my 5x9 sketchbooks. The more of these sort of pictures I do the more persuaded I am to simplify, omit, and consolidate. The images that work best, seems to me, are those with the least pickiness and detail. This was done on a white page in the same sketchbook as the image above.

The bright days of mid-February didn't last, giving way to dark snowy days. Dry, fluffy snow fell hard enough to obscure the view and left maybe six or eight inches. Another five or so fell on that, and by the time of this sketch the roads were still difficult for cars. The sketch to the right was done on a sketchbook page toned a darker olive. I drew the larger tree trunks and hinted at various slopes and borders of the creek in graphite. After that I sketched the snowy passages using tinted titanium white gouache. The darkest darks were done with tech pen and the trunks painted with dark watercolor.

Sometimes it doesn't look like we'll have anything to paint. But simply looking out the window provides unlimited opportunities.