I adore painting winter scenes however I am snow tested here in the south. We haven't had a decent snow in Marietta in quite a while. So I need to depend on photographs for my winter scenes. Working from photographs dependably gives challenges however particularly snow photographs.
Our standard simple to use photographs of snow simply don't complete a great job of catching the hues we see with our eyes. The light snow frequently looks unadulterated white and the shadows look dark.
When we paint what we find in the photographs we wind up with exhausting and level looking snow. We need to acquaint and misrepresent the hues with influence our winter/to snow canvases more bona fide and fascinating.
So how would we know what hues to put in our snow and shadows? Living in the south I can't watch snow so I need to depend on different specialists and teachers. One of my most loved assets for data on painting snow is Doug Dawson's magnificent book 'Catching Light and Color with Pastel'. Doug has a section on painting snow and I'd jump at the chance to share a couple of my most loved bits of counsel from his book.
We should start with Shadows on snow. (since I as a rule paint the shadows first) Both the light regions of the snow and the shadows have shading. Snow mirrors the shade of the light in the 'white' regions and the shade of the sky in the shadows
Shadows in snow mirror the shade of the sky. They are normally cool ...blue-green, blue-violet or blue.
The shading in the shadows get cooler as they go into the separation. (They take after the standards of aeronautical point of view)
Shadow hues move from blue-green to blue-violet to blue as space subsides. This is on the grounds that yellow is first sifted through of the light, at that point oranges and afterward reds. See the photograph above for a portion of the pastel hues I use for snow shadows beginning with blue-greens on the privilege to blue-violets to blues.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Snow isn't white and shadows are not dark. Snow is the shade of the light and shadows are the shade of the sky. Shadows are cool hues and move and get much cooler as they retreat.