The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

The Season of Whites

Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

In the Wild North     1891     Ivan Shishkin

   For outdoor painters, the season of snow means the season of whites on our palettes once again. Over the decades we have learned a lot about winter painting, especially working in a snowy landscape. We love the light at this time of year for several reasons. The weak winter sunlight is lower on the horizon, creating interesting blue-tinted long shadows much earlier in the afternoon. Bare trees reveal their architecture and the glancing angle of light reveals the shapes of the now bare land. Distant hills often take on a lovely blue cast, creating a cool background for the warm ochres, siennas and sepias of the plants and trees. Things are simplified and defined by their qualities of light. Objects can stand out bright and warm-colored in the sun against these cool backgrounds.

   One might think that the color of snow is mostly pure white, but that would be an error. We have measured the temperatures of sunlight on snow at various times of day and found a wide variation in color from warm to cool—rarely pure white. See:  The Colors of Snow. This is very helpful to know as we try to paint the winter landscape and perhaps warm it up in our pictures. We also keep a gray scale handy and a Kodak color temperature scale to assist with this. See: Shadow Light.

   It is often best to knock down the bright white of a primed canvas with a light wash of grayed, transparent color in order to have a way to begin comparing the values and temperatures accurately against each other. Titanium Dioxide White is very useful for our color mixes as it has high tinting strength and is cooler than either Flake White or Zinc White. We use it to carefully mix color strings made of subtle whites from warm to cool in our palettes. Once done, we are ready to paint with confidence and joy. This process speeds up our painting and shortens the amount of time we are standing in the frigid air trying to figure out this new winter world of white. For more on the differences in white oil paint  pigments, Members can click here:  White - "the representative of light".