Hello 

What a week we had here in the midwest. A good 13" of snow fell on Friday night here in northern Illinois and on Saturday morning my daughter walked away from a car totalling accident and 2 trees on my property came down from the weight of the snow. Tara wasn't hurt in the accident and there was no damage to the house from the trees falling, so I am thanking my lucky stars, and decided I would take advantage of the snowfall and take loads of reference photos. 

So you can guess what I will be talking about in this newsletter lesson, painting snow!

The Gifts is the exhibit to show off my Students works. It will be held at The Dole Mansion in Crystal Lake, IL
for more info CLICK HERE

NO Class this Thursday (Happy Thanksgiving!)  
YES there will be class this Saturday at The Studio in McHenry

For those students that didn't get a chance to drop off their work because of the snow storm last Sat, you can drop off works this Saturday at The Studio, McHenry. If you don't have the forms I will have forms available.

Happy Thankgiving!

David

For those living in the areas where it snows, I believe artist's have a love-hate relationship with winter. As an artist, snow is wonderful to paint, but living with it is another story.

The best thing about painting snow is that it teaches you how to use the white of the paper and usually is the only time I use Frisket, Maskoid, resist, or whatever you'd like to call it. 

Warm background, cool foreground, this is one of the times besides doing sunset scenes when you reverse the warms and cool colors. The shadows are cooler colors, like blues and grays, and that gives you the opportunity to  use warm earth tones in the backgrounds.

When painting tree branches or anything that has snow on it, it tends to be very easy to paint Maskoid where ever you want snow. If you need that snow to be in the shadows, paint the shadow color first, let it dry, then paint the snow with the Maskoid, then paint your darks. Remove the maskoid after everything is dry and there you have it, your snow covered, whatever.

Painting snow is also a great way of learning to paint in the negative....you paint around the snow to create it.

Copy a masters work, like I did here, below. I painted this John Pike's painting to learn how he painted snow. Just don't claim it as your own work, give credit to the artist that you are copying from.

Here are a few winter scenes I have painted using the warm background cool foreground method.