Once each winter I conduct a special workshop dealing with How to paint snow in watercolor. I love painting snow scenes but I am not particularly fond of the cold so I don’t do a lot of outdoor painting in the winter. Instead I use my pocket camera and bravely dash out into the cold and shoot like crazy, then retire to the warmth of my studio to do my painting. All the reference material we used in this class was shot in the last few weeks up at the Clear Creek Ranch and at our cabin on the east border of Zion National Park. We had plenty of snow to work so I put together a PowerPoint showing how to paint the effect of heavy snowfall on evergreens and how reflected light and cast shadows can be used to describe mass and form in the winter landscape. It was a great class with some of my most accomplished students. The paintings shown here were done as demonstrations in class and are about 5″ x 8″ in size.
