Easy Winter Watercolor Landscape Tutorial for Beginners
One of the biggest challenges I have when teaching watercolor is convincing students to follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Silly.
You don’t need 30 colors, expensive brushes, or three days to make a successful watercolor painting. Some of the best exercises use just a couple of colors and a few layers of paint. This easy winter watercolor landscape is a perfect example.
Using only Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, I’ll show you how two colors can create mountains, trees, shadows, atmosphere, and a surprising amount of depth.
Easy Winter Watercolor Landscape Using Only Two Colors
When I teach beginning watercolor classes, I deliberately start with simple paintings. Each week I make the exercises a little more complicated as students become more comfortable controlling water, paint, edges, and values.
This imagined winter landscape is one of the paintings I use early in class because it teaches several important watercolor concepts without overwhelming you with details.
Before you start painting, look at the finished landscape and try to reverse engineer it. Where would you begin? Which areas are lightest? Which shapes need soft edges? Which ones need to be darker and sharper?
Learning to analyze a finished painting this way is far more useful than simply trying to copy every brushstroke.
Why Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna Work So Well Together
The entire painting uses only Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna. That’s it.
Mixed together, these two colors create beautiful neutral grays while still allowing hints of warm brown and cool blue to separate on the paper. Change the proportions and you can move the mixture from a cold blue-gray to a much warmer earthy gray.
Instead of reaching for another tube of paint every time you need a different color, you learn to control temperature, value, and intensity with the two colors already on your palette. That’s an extremely useful skill for beginning watercolor painters.
Creating Depth with Simple Watercolor Layers
A white sheet of watercolor paper starts completely flat. Our job is to fool the eye into seeing distance and depth.
In this painting, the distant shapes remain lighter and softer while the foreground becomes progressively darker and more defined. A few carefully placed layers are enough to make some shapes appear miles away while others seem much closer.
You don’t need to paint every branch, rock, or patch of snow. In fact, adding too much detail can destroy the illusion. Sometimes knowing what not to paint is the harder lesson.
Wet-on-Wet vs. Wet-on-Dry Watercolor
One of the first decisions you make in watercolor is whether to paint wet-on-wet or wet-on-dry.
With wet-on-wet watercolor, you apply clean water first and then introduce paint into the damp area. The color spreads and creates softer, less predictable edges—perfect for distant mountains, atmospheric skies, and areas that shouldn’t demand too much attention.
With wet-on-dry watercolor, wet paint is applied directly to dry paper. The paint stays where you put it and creates a much more defined edge. That’s useful when you need stronger shapes and details in the foreground.
Neither method is better. The trick is learning when to use each one. That’s really what watercolor comes down to: problem solving.
Watch the Complete Winter Watercolor Tutorial
If you’d like to paint this winter landscape yourself, watch the complete tutorial below. I demonstrate the painting from the first wash through the final darker shapes and explain the decisions I’m making along the way.
Keep Your Watercolors Simple
The point of this exercise isn’t really to paint a winter landscape. It’s to learn how much you can accomplish with very little.
Two colors. A few washes. Soft edges in the distance. Darker values in the foreground.
That’s enough to turn a boring white piece of paper into a landscape with atmosphere and depth. Once you understand those basic decisions, you can make the paintings more complicated later.
Or don’t. Sometimes simple works just fine.
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Ryan Fox AWS, NWS, TWSA
Ryan Fox Painting