Painting

Tips for Painting Winter Scenes

Creating winter scenes is a joy for many artists because the scene transports them to a cool, crisp environment.  To many artists and art lovers, such scenes bring memories of happy times, playing outdoors, camping in the snow or experiencing winter sports.  There is also the impact of a well painted snow scene as a décor item.  They are often the types of scenes around which you could build an entire room.

Painters of all types offer winter scenes.  Potters have an especially interesting way to create snow.  Some use a liquid clay formula that is thick and rich, opaque and dry and non-shiny looking.  These liquid formulas are often called slip and are sometimes little more than liquid clay that has the adhesion properties to adhere to the shapes and forms the potter creates.  Other opaque materials are more glaze-like and have glassy finishes once they are fired in the kiln.  Carving through the white of slip or glaze to the color of the clay body allows sharp detail to be depicted.  Such handwork is a beautiful thing and represents skill and materials management that is to be appreciated.

Acrylic painters use opaque whites and reflected tones to create the look of snow.  It is quite possible to add gels and/or compounds to create even more dimension to such areas in a painting.  To give the look of snow piling up in a scene you can combine materials with your opaque tones to give them fluff and body.  Modeling paste can be applied prior to painting and, once dry, it can be painted over to give the look of thickly applied pigment.

Painting white, wintry scenes on paper offers some interesting opportunities for learning.  There are lots of ways to create or maintain whites during the painting of winter scenes.  But, remember too, that snow is not just white.  It reflects all the colors around it and is actually a very colorful mass.  If you want to hold watercolor paper, whether using acrylic as watercolor or actual watercolor, you can use liquid frisket to cover the paper tone.  Apply the frisk where you want to maintain white, allow it to dry and then paint over it.  After you have allowed the painted areas to dry, the liquid frisket will roll off by gentle rubbing.  You can either leave the paper color or paint another tone in those salvaged areas.  Pretty cool!

Paper artists can also use a couple of other methods for retrieving whites in winter scenes.  Scratching through darks, e.g., tree branches you want to look as if they are covered with a dusting of snow, can be done with the edge of an X-Acto knife or other blade.  A sideways scrape will lift the color away and expose the paper brightness from beneath.  If the paper is still only slightly damp, you can use a pointed tool such as a compass point or large darning needle to scratch.  Either will rake very small lines into the paper, picking up and disturbing the surface to show the paper color in those lines.  This allows very sharp detail opportunities.

Clay-coated board artisans have a great way to retrieve white/light areas when painting highlights or something like ice and snow.  The surface of clay-coated board is soft enough to allow gentle carving through applied watercolor, oil or acrylic.  That gives this surface the unique characteristic of instant light area capturing.  (See www.ampersandart.com.)

Canvas painters, paper painters, clay-coated hardboard painters or potters all have ways to create the areas of white/light that are needed to make the high tone painting of a winter scene believable and appealing.  Professional artists are always stretching the envelope of materials and you should, too.  Winter scenes give us all opportunities to learn and experiment.

Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 19 No. 3 — January 2009