Painting in a Fog

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Painting the light effects created by fog can be frustrating at first, primarily because fog is typically moving around while we are trying to paint it, making the scene ever-changing. This can be maddening, and may cause us, like Monet, to put a foot right through our canvas!

For our oil classes, we developed a good exercise which can go a long way towards elucidating the fundamentals of painting fog effects. Instead of trying to keep up with a moving subject, we had the class work in the studio, using one of our photos greatly enlarged. To make it even more interesting, we chose an image taken on an exceptional day when warm yellow sunlight back-lit the subject, turning the normally cool-toned bluish-gray fog effect on its pictorial head. Everything in our subject was suffused with this yellowy tone, even the snow. This can present a serious color mixing and value-matching challenge.

Our solution was to break the image down into large masses of tone and then carefully analyze and…