Late In The Day – en plein air watercolor winter landscape painting

“Late In The Day” – 7″ x 11″

The golden hour.

I find this kind of light and this time of day to be as challenging to capture as anything. The warm glow infuses everything with a golden warmth, yet there is still a definite contrast between cool shade and warm sunlight glow.

In past efforts with similar light, I have literally infused the entire paper with a consistent warm undertone.  For this work, I tried to keep the warm, sun lit areas separate from the cool shady areas of snow, earth and background trees.  But, I also kept the “cool” areas warmer than I might under different light conditions. For most winter scenes, the snow covered areas are usually painted with a cool blue-gray wash.  In this one, the shady snow, is painted with a warm, almost violet gray kept at a low intensity.  Even though it is warm, it is still visually cooler than the bright, intense yellow orange used in the sun-struck areas.

The overall impact is generated with three different visual contrasts – temperature (cool violet vs warm yellow) as well as intensity (low intensity violet vs. high intensity yellow) and complementary colors (violet vs. yellow)

Solving the visual challenge was an interesting and thought provoking process.  One I’m looking forward to tackling again.