“Wind Mill” Winter Watercolor Painting

I’m starting to love watercolors

I worked on my seventh painting this time, and it’s a winter watercolor painting. This 300 painting challenge is very exciting and I invite you to do it too. I used to be afraid of using watercolors and creating paintings with them. But the reason is I didn’t practice enough. Last week, I exercised creating winter watercolor painting on paper and today’s painting is also a winter scenery.

Materials for the winter watercolor drawing:

• regular watercolor palettes
• brushes of various sizes
• water
• paper towels
• tape
• good quality paper

You can use less pigmentated watercolors and still get decent paintings, but try to use good paper. My paper is 280 gsm and it’s specially designed for watercolors. So I can easily use wet on wet techniques. In time, you can upgrade to better colors, but the paper is very important.

I was so sad and nervous that my watercolors were terrible. Painting with watercolors was my least favorite art activity. However, now it’s one of my favorites. I think it’s needless to say that I am loving all the mediums I tried until now: acrylics, oil, watercolors, pencils, and ink.

I got inspiration from the images on the internet for this painting. I saw a very simple, yet lovely pastel painting on the internet and I wanted to try it too. And I’m going to show you how to make it.

Steps of creation

1. Start by wetting the paper with a flat brush. Don’t use too much water so you don’t ruin the paper. The paper should have a glossy look, but not too watery. Only apply water to the area where you want your colors to blend together or you need a foggy effect. I am applying water for the sky and where I want to paint trees in the distance.
2. While it’s wet apply the color of the sky. Since my winter watercolors take place somewhere in the twilight, I am creating a purple-pink-ish sky.
3. Use a hair-dryer to dry the paper just a bit. Don’t dry it completely. We will need to blend the trees in the distance with the sky colors. Apply paint in a tree shape on the color of the sky. Don’t worry if you don’t understand these steps right now, you can watch a video on this page with the winter watercolor painting process.
4. Wait until it dries or use a hair-dryer to speed-up the process!
5. Next, start painting trees with black mixed with purple or blue. These trees are closer to the viewer so we use darker colors
6. Add other details to the painting: a fence, branches, steps in the snow, bunnies or birds. Anything that will make the painting feel alive.
7. Use undiluted water paint to add details on the fence and trees.

You can watch my video of how I did this painting. I am publishing a lot of winter landscape paintings on my Youtube channel so I invite you to subscribe.