Snowy Days

Heavy Snow on Druid Hill Creek (photo)

The latest cold snap here in flyover land settled on us a few days ago and has refused to leave. The day before the cold weather the temperatures here in Iowa reached 60, but the next day it was thirty degrees colder and a cold wet snow fell with a whump. This was the kind of wet, sticky stuff that is heavy and causes heart attacks in the unwary shovelers, every time. Since then the daily highs have barely reached the high 20s and the snow has lingered, encrusting trees and twigs. And until yesterday the cloud cover was heavy and the light limited (left).

The weather got me thinking about painting winter scenes. Snow is white--we all know that--but taking time to really study the snow reveals the presence of many colors, both subtle and obvious. The colors in snow depend deeply on time of day, cloud cover or lack of it, the colors of surrounding objects, and more. It's enough to discourage a beginning painter. Like so much in realist art, repeated intense study can help.

Hoff, "Up North," watercolor, 9x12

Here is an example of a snow scene in watercolor that contains no white at all. This particular painting is a studio work done on heavy cold-press paper. My first step in most watercolors is a more or less detailed pencil drawing. You can use graphite or colored pencils but water soluble pencil is a great way to begin. After that I usually put down broad washes of color, often faintly coloring the whole support. As you can see in the painting above, the background wash was a warm yellow-brown. Over that I added the foliage shapes with a darker mix and painted the lamposts, figures, and walls with an even darker mix, doing it in several steps. The yellow of the lamps and sky were added in the late stages. In some of my watercolors I use ink as a way to show shapes and transitions, but in this case the image is all watercolor. 

This winter I'll be doing a lot more snowy scenes, I suspect.