Awhile back I headed up the mountain with my husband for some snow photos and it’s been so chilly this week I decided to embrace it and paint some snow. Here are three of the photos my husband took …all mine were lost when my laptop was stolen recently:(
There were things I liked about each of them but none of them were exactly what I wanted. I love a square format so the first step was playing with some cropped versions to see if something struck me as a good starting point. My favourite was the first version because the rocks lead into and around the picture plane. The lowlying cloud was also a big winner for me a sit gives that sense of being aon a mountaintop above the clouds.
I was looking for that early morning glow so I knew I would change the colours quite a lot.
I started with a warm underpainting which would eventually get covered with the later layers but would hopefully give me the glow I was wanting.
You can see I’ve played with the composition a bit, mobing and reshaping some of the rocks and adding in stunted shrubs to reinforce the visual pathway.
I addded in some Magenta in the shadows and started working on the cool background shapes of the sky and lower hills and river.
Adding in the snow was fun…I used pale tints of blue, pinks and peach keeping them warmer in the sunlight and cooler as they slid into the shadow of the rocks.
Scraping the paint over the rocks to suggest a coating of snow and then adding some darker blues and purples to the shadowed snow set up some extra contrast, interest and texture.
A little Naples Yellow Reddish gave the sunlit rocks that glow I was looking for.
That little figure in the background was my final touch. I think it adds a great focal point, heightens the sense of space and gives a better sense of the size of those granite boulders.
My homage to the iconic kunanyi/Mt Wellington which is the backdrop to our little cottage in the bush.
Lindy Whitton Studio 
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