Painting Winter

Exploiting the Winter Landscape

The Magpie Oil Claude Monet

Winter is a great time to paint outdoors in most places of the country, but one has to be an outdoors person to appreciate this fact. Proper clothing is a must, but perhaps more important is the proper attitude toward the season. Embrace the winter as a bug-free opportunity to explore color and light, and consider these advantages.

On clear winter days, the light can be clean and strong, unaffected by the warm weather humidity that dissipates the luminance of the light in the summer. Because the sun is lower in the South, this produces interesting angular shadows all day long, even at midday, and good shadows are an indispensable ingredient for interesting paintings.

Far from being depressing, cloudy-bright days are perfect for painting when a steady, even light source is useful, and makes our job much easier than chasing the light on a sunny day.