Hi, my name is James Gurney,
and this video is about painting snow.
And this is a rare snow dragon
and scene in a parking lot in Kingston, New York.
I'll show you three paintings, first we'll do a campfire in the snow
and then we're gonna do the receding snow on a big rock,
and then we're gonna finish up with a cloverleaf.
So come with me, let's paint snow.
(exciting xylophone melody)
(melody fades)
The only way I'm gonna be able to paint in this
really cold winter weather is
to build a campfire and paint next to it
or I'll just paint the campfire.
I'm gonna be starting on sketchbook pages
primed with kind of a buff colored casein.
And then just wash in the colors with
transparent washes of gouache watercolor.
And then paint in the snow kind of in shadow
because it's getting to be twilight,
and I'll put it in there in a kind of deep blue-gray.
And then refine some of the flames.
And then make a shaft of light coming across
to highlight the fire pit
and to define the relief a little bit.
Now of course we know that snow is always white,
but to make it look white in the context of a painting
it often has to be darkened a bit relative to other colors,
like this warm orange color of the fire.
There's three things to think about with snow,
color, light, and shape.
So in this patch of snow, the light is coming in from the right.
It's direct sunlight with blue sky light filling the shadows.
I'm able to paint outside with watercolor and gouache
because it's about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, about 20 degrees Celsius.
I'm using a water soluble colored pencil
on watercolor paper that's been lightly primed
with a just off-white, cool color.
And now I'm trying to map in shapes of the shadow
as they wrap across the uneven contours of the ground.
And also the way that the snow is hollowed out by footprints
and indentations in the snow.
I'm using a small palette of colors,
white, yellow ochre, scarlet pyrrol,
and cerulean blue, watercolor and gouache.
Mixing the cerulean blue and the scarlet pyrrol together
won't give me a black, but it'll give me a dark enough color for now
to suggest the deep shadows of the rock,
which is probably the darkest color.
The far tress are fairly dark.
I'm just drawing with a brush right now trying to get a sense of the textures.
My palette is a metal box used for pencils
painted white with enamel.
And I'm using a little cup,
a backpackers' two ounce Nalgene cup.
There's links in the description that give you all the materials.
But I wanna wet the surface on the paper
in advance of painting that cast shadow.
By wetting the surface first with clear water
I can get a softer edge on the cast shadow.
If I just lightly go over areas I've already painted
it won't pick up the paint.
So now that that surface is wet a little bit
I can load up the color of the shadow.
Cerulean, that's gonna be a little too blue,
but I'll give it a go here.
If I drop that in there it'll soften up a bit.
Now this is a shadow of a tree going across the snow in the foreground.
(clock ticking)
The reason a shadow like this is blue
is because the only light shining in it is from the blue of the sky.
Every area of a picture is lit either by the direct sun
or by the blue of the sky
or by some reflected light.
I'm using a little bit of opaque white
to flatten the color, make it less grainy,
and also of course to lighten the color.
A few cast shadows of that azalea plant
that's planted next to the rock.
And then here we've got the plant that I'm looking at.
I'm painting the spaces between some of the branches
with the tip of a fairly large round brush.
Even tiny details like this can be painted with a fairly big brush.
And I can always come back in and paint
the light lines over dark areas, too
instead of painting around the light lines.
My easel fits on the top of a camera trypod.
It's a sketch easel that's homemade and you can find more information
about this kind of easel at the Facebook group
"Sketch Easel Builders."
Now look at those big active curving shapes
of the melt areas cutting into the snow.
And then far back in the scene, very, very, thin lines
of the bits of snow
and melt areas compressed in space.
The vertical lines of the trees.
So this painting, like any painting,
sets up a series of abstract themes, abstract shapes.
Now between those three items, color, light, and shape,
which is the most important?
I'd have to say it's light, because everything else follows after that.
(delicate piano melody)
So it's the light that makes those branches
warm orange-yellow or dark brown
and it's the light that determines
whether the snow is that bluish color
in shadow or the warm white in the light.
And now I'm going in and painting
the little bits that are catching the light
trying to set up as much contrast between
the very small and delicate
and the big broader shapes in the scene.
(contemplative piano melody continues)
(♪ "Heartbreaking" by Kevin MacLeod ♪)
(bristles rustle softly under music)
(distant bird chirping)
(music fades)
I'm in the parking lot of the market
and I've only got a few minutes really
to do this quick sketch of the freeway overpass.
Very limited color, winter color -- uh oh
a guy's parking in the way, darn it, don't do that.
(bristles scratching)
I'm painting in gouache over
a very thin warm acrylic underpainting.
And right now I'm using a flat brush
to paint that overpass of Route 209 as it crosses 9W
in Kingston, New York.
Because of all the road salt and dust kicked into the air,
that far distance is fairly light gray,
a combination of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue with some white.
I can go a lot darker with the car and the brightest light is the snow
that still remains on the side of the road.
So while the snow is still around, we can still paint some of it.
If you're a watercolor painter you can paint from inside your car.
And it's always out there to learn about color, value, and shape.
(playful brass band improvisation)
(buttons clicking into place)
(♪ "March of the Spoons" by Kevin MacLeod ♪ continues)
(shuffling shoes)