It’s been snowing and blowing for weeks here in western Pennsylvania, with temperatures below zero some nights and highs in the teens. What better time, then, to paint snow-covered evergreens?
I have two different techniques for painting snow on evergreen trees. Here’s a condensed version of the instructions for Technique #1 – click to enlarge it. (I’ll post Technique #2 tomorrow.)
Before we get into painting the tree, let’s talk about some color-mixing options for those cool blue shadows that we see on snow.
Snow shadows can range from pure Cobalt Blue to a duller gray-blue or violet. They can even have multiple colors of reflected light in them. But for our purposes, let’s keep things fairly simple and play around with some basic shadow color mixes like these:
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| Cobalt Blue + Permanent Alizarin Crimson combine to make a beautiful violet |
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| Ultramarine Blue + Rose Violet (or Permanent Rose or Quinacridone Rose) |
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| Thalo (Pthalo) Blue + Permanent Alizarin |
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| Instead of a red, try mixing Burnt Sienna with a blue like Cobalt |
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| Ultramarine Blue + Payne’s Gray is a default shadow mixture for me |
When painting a snow scene, you’ll have a range of shadow values. The deep blue-gray and purple shadow colors I mixed above would be diluted to make more subtle shadows that are lighter in value.
Okay, let’s start on our evergreen…
1 – Lightly draw the evergreen tree with a pencil, blocking in shapes that represent individual branches covered with snow. There’s no need to separate the snow layer from the green branches at this point.
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| 1 – Pencil drawing |
2 – Wet the sky with clean water. Mix up a generous puddle of paint for the sky. Color choices are up to you – it could be a sunny Cerulean Blue sky or a stormy blue-gray with touches of purple in it. Brush paint onto the sky area, making a graded wash that is darker at the top and gradually gets lighter toward the horizon. If you’d like to suggest snowflakes in the sky, drop a few crystals of kosher salt into the sky wash while it’s still wet. (Kosher salt is easier to handle than table salt, because of its larger crystals.) Let the sky dry thoroughly, then brush off the salt.
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| 2 – Paint the sky and distant trees |
Paint distant trees in the background. If you paint them while the sky is still wet, the trees will have soft edges and look out-of-focus. If the trees are painted on dry paper, the top edge of the treeline will be more defined. In any case, keep detail to a minimum – our focus is on the evergreen in the foreground.
3 – Begin painting shadows on the clumps of snow that cover the branches. Use light to medium values, and vary the colors, if you like, incorporating pink, blue and lavender tones.
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| 3 – Paint first shadow washes (I used Cobalt Blue + Permanent Alizarin for the shadows in this example) |
4 – Paint darker shadows in the deepest recesses of the tree branches and cast shadows where an upper branch shades a lower one. Our tree now appears to be completely covered with rounded clumps of snow.
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| 4 – Add darker shadows (I used Cobalt + Permanent Rose for the shadows in this example) |
In my example, I painted rolling, hilly terrain in the background behind the trees. To do this, lay down a stroke of paint on dry paper, indicating the top of a hill, then immediately rinse your brush and blot excess water from it. (The brush should be very damp, wet but not drippy.) Drag the damp brush along the upper edge of the brush stroke to soften the edge and feather out the paint. Repeat the rinsing, blotting, and dragging until you’ve diluted the edge of the paint so much that there’s nothing there but clear water. This will give you a soft-edged shadow, as shown on the hills below.
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| Paint background terrain |
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| 5 – Begin painting greenery (I used Pthalo Blue + Permnanent Alizarin for the shadows in this example) |
6 – It’s finally time for the finishing touches. Evaluate the tree – is there enough value contrast? It’s important to have bright highlights and deep, dark shaded areas. That’s what makes a scene appear sunlit. In my example, I added touches of very dark green foliage and some deeper shadows on the snow-covered branches. I also painted the shadow cast by the tree on the snowy ground.
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| 6 – Paint darkest values |
Note: When I wrote this lesson for a watercolor class a few years ago, I drew and painted six separate trees on one page, so I could show my students the details of each step in the painting process. If you compare them, you’ll see that they vary slightly from each other – don’t let that confuse you if you want to try painting along with this tutorial.
Tomorrow I’ll show you another technique for painting snow-covered evergreens. Try them both, and see which one you prefer!
Find more step-by-step watercolor tutorials on the “Tutorials” page of the Everyday Artist blog.
17 Comments
What fun! Thank you for this tutorial! Our snow left us over the weekend. We, too, have been experiencing sub-zero temperatures, but the last couple days have been in the 50s. It smells and feels like spring, but I know it's a false hope. We have a lot of winter to go yet here in Ohio.
I just flew down to Florida yesterday to teach two workshops, and the warm sunny weather feels so good! I love seeing green grass and flowers blooming. This should help me get through the rest of this winter – spring will be here before we know it. And what a beautiful spring it will be! I think it might be my favorite time of year.
Very nice tutorial Leslie!
Thanks, Annie! Guess we were both writing about painting snow this past week. I enjoyed your wintery tutorial, too.
How interesting! This was a well explained tutorial. I will definitely be trying this out around Christmas time!
Christmas morning 2020 – Blessings Annie and thank you. Snow covered trees are my greatest challenge. Yours is the best tutorial I've found.
Flooding today in northcentral PA. I live just below you, I think.
Upon giving the sky a bluish wash, how then do you leave the top of the tree which is above the horizon white so that the snow effect on the tree may be shown; everything above the horizon will have a bluish wash color. The part of the tree sketched above the horizon will drawn in the part with the bluish wash. With painting media other than ‘oil paints’ it’s almost impossible to obtain a pure white effect with, for example, white watercolor paint. I find that obtaining a pure white color is very difficult with most art media such as: watercolors, oil pastels, etc. Thanks.
P.S I recently started to paint during this COVID period in our lives.
Hi Vic – If you look at Step 2, you’ll see that I painted around the top part of the tree when I did the blue sky, leaving the tree area white. That’s called “negative painting”, when you paint what’s around an object rather than painting the object itself. That way, the paper in the tree area is still bright white when you are ready to start painting the shadows and branches on it.
Good luck with your painting, and let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you so much for sharing your talent with us. You are very generous, and I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!
This is a wonderful lesson. Your skill in teaching is as great as your skill in painting, which is considerable. I am now a fan, and will continue to look for your postings on the internet
Thanks for sharing you make it so simple.
Just found you on Pinterest and subscribed. I wanted to print your directions for painting the snow covered tree, method #l, so I would have it at my fingertips while painting. When going to the print mode, I see the text is very light and hard to read. Is this set up so it can’t be printed?
I’m not sure why it would be showing up that way. It is an older post that was imported from Blogger into WordPress – maybe that affected it somehow. I’m sorry, but I don’t know of anything I can do to help. It’s still readable online though. I hope you’ll find it helpful.
Hi Leslie,
I’m writing to you from Germany. Thanks for the tutorial. I think I needed more time to translate than to paint. My English is a bit rusty. I haven’t been painting that long. I will experiment with the shades of blue. Thanks again. Many greetings from Ute from Leipzig in Germany
I hope the tutorial helps you with your painting. Enjoy!
This is the best tutorial I’ve seen on watercolor. I am a stained glass mosaic artist and just starting playing with watercolors. I thought watercolors would be easier than cutting glass but found that I’m wrong! I’ll be following your directions step by step!
Cheryl Lovett
Keller, Texas
I’m glad you’re excited about watercolors. Have fun playing around with them, and keep practicing – that’s the secret to improving.