Easy Snowy Landscape Watercolor Tutorial for Beginners
How to Paint Snow Without White Paint
One of my favorite demonstrations for beginning watercolor students is a snowy landscape.
Why snow?
Because the watercolor paper is the snow.
Half the painting is already finished before you even pick up a brush.
Seriously.
The biggest challenge for most beginners is learning that watercolor often works in reverse from other painting mediums. Instead of painting the white snow, you preserve the white paper and paint around it. All you really have to do is surround those whites with something darker and suddenly the paper transforms into snow-covered fields, rooftops, and distant hills.
Easy, right?
Well… not exactly.
Learning to protect the whites of the paper is one of the most important skills in watercolor. Once you cover those whites with paint, getting them back can be difficult. That’s why snowy landscapes make such a fantastic exercise. They force you to think ahead.
Use a Limited Palette for Winter Landscapes
Another reason I love snow scenes is that they can be painted with a very limited palette. Most of the time I’m only using three or four colors. A cool blue, perhaps a violet, maybe a warm earth color, and we’re off to the races.
You’ll also notice something else.
Try Painting Without a Reference Photo
I don’t use reference photographs for these demonstrations.
Now before photographers start throwing things at me (remember, I was a professional travel photographer before becoming a painter), let me explain.
People see a photograph and immediately want to copy it.
Every tree.
Every branch.
Every fence post.
Every little detail.
No!
That’s not what I’m after.
Simplify Trees Instead of Painting Every Branch
What interests me is the impression of a winter landscape, not a detailed inventory of every object standing in it.
The beauty of watercolor is suggestion.
A few brushstrokes become a forest.
A blob of paint becomes a tree.
A soft wash becomes falling snow.
If your blob of paint looks like a tree, congratulations.
You have succeeded.
The goal is mood.
Cold blue shadows stretching across the snow.
A distant tree line disappearing into the atmosphere.
Snowflakes drifting through the air while we’re safely observing the scene from inside a warm cabin with a cup of coffee.
That’s the painting I want to create.
With watercolor, the real challenge is learning how to control depth by controlling water, edges, and values. Make the distant trees softer and cooler. Keep the foreground darker and sharper. Let the paint do some of the work for you.
It can be done.
In fact, it’s much easier than most people think once they stop trying to paint every single tree.
Learn a few of my favorite tricks in the full-length tutorial now available on my YouTube channel-
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Ryan Fox AWS, NWS, TWSA
Ryan Fox Painting
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