Saturday, January 3, 2009

Snowy Meadow in Watercolor


While I am not especially fond of snowy scenes, a reader of this blog made a special request to which I am responding in this post. Since the requester is a native of Canada with plenty of access to scenes like this, I am a bit puzzled at the request.......Anyway, here goes.

I don't often paint in watercolor so this one took some preparation and thought. The whitest streaks of snow were covered with masking fluid which was removed after the initial graded wash of pthalo and ultramarine blue. The rest was just a matter of serially laying in the trees and embellishing the foreground with some stray grasses poking through the snow. The white patches look reddish but only in the photograph -- must have been the light while I was taking the picture. In the actual painting they are a brilliant white which, mixed with the pale bluish foreground, gives the painting a "cold" look.

Snowy Meadow, Watercolor on 140lb paper, 9"x12", SOLD

3 comments:

  1. What a lovely piece! The lighter, more transparent trees in the background lend a convincing sense of distance and cold atmosphere. I'm not surprised someone from Canada wants a snow scene, we all like things that are familiar and take us to places we've already been.

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  2. Atul, Great job on this painting. It looks very cold and shows lots of distance. I find that it is not easy for artists who paint in oil or acrylic to do watercolor as the process is reversed, so I am very impressed that you are able to accomplish this.

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  3. Jan and Carol: Thanks for those generous comments. What I find the most difficult (and anxiety-provoking) about watercolor is the finality in each meeting of brush with paper. Once the color is down it is there to stay. Of course, doing a few watercolor pieces before returning to acrylic seems to encourage much greater economy of brushwork. So periodically switching media does have benefits!

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