Beginner Friendly Snowy Winter Landscape Simple and Fun

Good morning. Deb Watson here to demonstrate how you can paint this lovely little card step by step. The two main colors are blue and red, although you will want a little green for the trees, and some opaque white is nice for falling snow and icicles. Here's my outline. I'm working on Arches watercolor paper and I'm going to start with the sky. Mix a small puddle of blue and make it as well saturated with color as you can. You can see I'm adding color a lot of times. Whatever blue you have is fine. I like cerulean blue mixed with a little ultramarine to darken it. Having a puddle of color to dip your brush in works much better than trying to get your paint from your watercolor well. It makes a smoother wash and it'll just give you better results. I'm starting with a line of dark blue across the top of the sky. I want it lighter as it goes down, so I just add more water to my blue puddle. That lightens it up and I paint the bottom half of the sky. Try to get your sky as dark as you want in the first wash, but don't sweat it. You can always do another wash later on. A lot of watercolor is adjusting the values as you go along. Now to add stars to my sky, I'm going to try sprinkling the wet wash with table salt. The salt will absorb some of the water and create little blotches. This takes a while. It doesn't happen immediately. Now snow is white, but snow always has some shading on it. So the snow at the bottom is going to get a coat of light blue and I'm trying to keep it a little lighter near the top of the hills where the sun would be hitting. The edge of the road where the posts, the fence posts go, gets a little darker blue shadow. You can put the darker blue shadow on while it's still wet or wait for it to dry. You're not seeing me use the hair dryer, but I dried this little card between these washes. The background snow is also getting some blue and once again if you can have it lighter at the top and darker at the bottom, it would be good. Remember that watercolor dries lighter than it looks when it's wet, so you want it to be a little darker than you want when you put it down. And if you get a bloom, that's where some water gets in and makes an unsightly blotch like I did here on the left. Just we'll give it another coat of paint to smooth it out once it's dried. See the effect the salt is having in the sky? I think I may have used too much salt. I lifted up some of my darker color with the paper towel, but I wish I had just left it. But no matter what happens in your painting, just keep painting. You can change anything with watercolor. While I still have the blue color left, I'm going to fix the bloom first with another wash and put some tire ruts in the snow. The tire ruts follow the edge of the road and they get smaller or thinner as they move away towards the house. Don't make them too dark. You don't want too much emphasis on them. And a few horizontal strokes going through the ruts breaks them up and makes them look more natural than just two lines. The right side snowbank also gets a little shadow, but just along the bottom edge. Don't outline the whole hill. Evaluating this, I think the sky is wimpy and the salt is just too much. So I mix more blue and when I give the sky another coat of color, it deepens the color and kind of mitigates that texture a little bit. The shadow on the left side of my road has also disappeared as it dried, so that gets more blue. Now that these are somewhat okay, I'm going to add the trees. I'm making my own green by mixing my blue with some gold, but you can use any green you like. A darker green is going to look better than a light bright green. So if your green is too bright, you can darken most greens by adding a little black or a little dark red. And you don't want both trees to look exactly the same. When you have two things that look exactly alike, they like bookends. So paint the nearest tree the darkest green and then add a little water to make the farther away tree just a little bit lighter. Adding a tiny bit of color, a little bit of green, to the opposite side of the church helps too. So now you have three areas of green and not two. Our last color is red for the buildings and the chimney. I know these are tiny buildings, but when you paint them red, if you can get the red a little darker under the eaves and on the side of the building, it will look more realistic. So how do you darken the red? You can add black or dark green. Paint the church and the steeple. How does your painting look so far? If you don't like the blues, you can tweak the values by either re-wetting and lifting some up or giving them another coat and making them darker. For the roofs on the building, you can leave them all white or you can give them a tiny bit of shading, but not very much. You want them mostly white. If they don't stand out at all, if the blue behind them isn't any darker, you can always outline the top of the buildings with a pencil. The windows of the buildings can be light or dark. I like one light window just to show that somebody's home. And luckily, I have some red left because I almost forgot to paint the chimney. It's time to evaluate this again. For my painting, I'm going to darken the church and the ruts in the snow just a little bit. And then last, I'm going to paint the fence posts. To get the color for my fence post, I mixed my red and my green and it turned kind of brownish, so that was perfect. Now a fun thing in this video is to add smoke coming out of the chimney. If you use your brush, just a clean damp brush, and rub the area where you want the smoke. Rub it enough with enough moisture, you can see it's reactivating the paint, and then dab that paint up with a paper towel, and you have instant smoke with nice soft edges. If you want it still whiter, you can add some opaque white paint. Just don't paint the white on too thick for smoke. You want to be able to kind of see through it a little bit. The white is excellent to add snow to your pine trees, and icicles are always fun for a cold wintry look. I love putting icicles on my buildings. You can put a moon or sun in your sky anywhere you like. You can do big moons, small moons, even half moons. It just gives the landscape more interest. If you have trouble getting a round shape, trace around a dime or some other small round object. If you have a moon, you need some moonlight. So I'm putting the moonlight on the top of the distant hill with my white, and on the top of the closest hill. And the moon would throw a shadow from this tree, so I'm putting a little darker blue behind it, and I like the way that looks. You can play with your values as much as you like. Make things darker or lighter until you're happy with it. Now I'm going to add some falling snow. I know this is gimmicky, but I love falling snow. I load a brush with white, and I tap it on my finger hard enough to flip the white color onto the paper. Last, you can use a pen or pencil to outline anything that you think needs it. You can outline your roofs, you can outline your steeple. My windows don't show very well, so I'm going to outline those. And here's my card. Your card doesn't need to look like mine to be successful. Every painting is unique. Cards are a great way to learn watercolor painting. They're small, quick, and fun, but they still teach you the same basic skills as a larger painting. You can find everything you need to paint these cards at watsonwatercolor.com. So take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and treat yourself. Have some fun and get painting. Happy painting!