The Colors of Snow - Perspectives from The Artist's Road
The Colors of Snow
Perspectives from The Artist's Road  Cedar Snow Shadows 12 x 16" Watercolor © John Hulsey The large snow storms that have graced our area in past winters have given us opportunities to study the unique light, colors and shadows that only snow cover provides. Painting snow presents many challenges to the plein air painter—the least of which is the cold. The primary difficulty is the intense light reflected by the snow. This causes us to squint down, and in so doing we darken the entire scene before us somewhat. This is fine when painting the lights, but it gets very troublesome as we peer into the shadow areas. The iris opens up to take in more light, giving us false information about the value and temperature of the shadows. Switching back and forth between shadow and light can not only cause us to paint our values incorrectly, but also get the color temperature of those shadows wrong. Most importantly, it is important to protect our vision from the bright glare, but sunglasses can compound the difficulty in seeing color and temperature correctly. The brightness of sunlit snow can also throw off our reading of its color temperature. It can be easy to see the snow as pure white, but it generally is not. Snow can have anything from a cool, bluish cast to a warm, yellow-orange cast, depending on the time of day. The local color of objects nearby can also reflect onto and influence the color of snow. The best approach is to make careful observations and comparisons from the outset in order to get the color down correctly and to always reserve pure white for the little highlights here and there where the sun hits the snow head-on. To illustrate this, we set up a tripod on a spot facing south southeast to capture the changing snow and shadow colors under our large burning bushes. The camera was set to automatic settings. We took pictures at four different times during the day, making exposures two and a half hours apart. Here are our results (with no Photoshop corrections):
  9:30 am 12:00 pm  2:30 pm 5:00 pm The four color samples below were taken from the shadows cast by the farthest left burning bush in each photograph. Shadow Colors
 9:30 am 12:00 pm 2:30 pm 5:00 pm Notice that the shadows display vivid blues at either end of the day, but tend to go grayer in the afternoon. The darkest shadows go hand-in-hand with the most intense sunlight. The color of the shadows is influenced by the color of the light, so as sunset approaches, the shadows take on more red and yellow.
The four samples below were taken from the non-shadowed snow areas. Snow Colors  9:30 am 12:00 pm 2:30 pm 5:00 pm It is always fascinating to discover the variations in color warmth and coolness in the shadows throughout the day and the amount of color in the unshadowed areas of snow which the eye tends to perceive as white. Snow is a wonderful subject, a canvas reflecting the changing light and shadows of the day and night. It also provides us with one of the very few instances in which the ground plane can be lighter than the sky.
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