About the Painting | Frosty Morning Pastels

Published: May 14, 2021 | Last updated: May 17, 2021

Everything was coated in a light dusting of frost and the sky was draped in creamy pastel shades.

Frosty Morning Pastels (Sold)

This past December (2020), I went with my Dad to get some firewood for the coming winter. I wanted to help with the wood and I also wanted to go see the cutting area because I know that it's really nice in there. A mini road trip adventure! I had to get up at the crack of dawn, and my oh my, it was such a pretty morning! The trees and the reeds in the ditches were coated in a light dusting of frost and the sky was draped in creamy pastel shades. It wasn't very cold, even though it looked quite cold. It was a mild day -- there were even bugs flying around in the afternoon sun!

It's a nice scenic drive to get to the wood cutting area, so I was enjoying the sights and trying to soak up all the beauty of that morning on our way there. The painting above was inspired by this photo that I took that day:

I just adored that pink and blue sky! I knew that I wanted to paint something inspired by that place, but I didn't get to paint this until late February. Honestly, I like this place so much and I find it so inspiring that I could paint this area anytime and all the time! I don't know what it is about the trees and those reeds that I find so enjoyable to paint, but I do. It's kind of swampy and the trees can be a bit raggedy, and there's a lot of dead trees here and there (it was too wet for them, I guess). It's such normal and common type of scenery in this neck of the woods, and the people around here are so used to it because they drive by it all the time, I doubt many think twice about this area or think it's particularly beautiful, but I've sure come to like it!

I've actually made a previous painting inspired by the same area (not quite the same spot, but very close) a year ago:

Crow's Passage

I was surprised at how different the paintings look. I wasn't trying to make them look similar, but I was still surprised. The newer painting has more "crispness" and detail to it. I really like both of them and the unique vibe each one has. I plan to make a lot more paintings inspired by these places since they are close to my heart and they're so much fun to paint.

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Unfortunately, I only took two progress photos... I suppose I got so caught up in the "flow" of painting and forgot to take more photos.

I painted the sky first. Wet-in-wet gradient from cerulean blue to raw sienna and then to quinacridone red. I painted the sky down to where the farthest reeds would be. I made sure to plan my composition and placement of the horizon line well beforehand, as to not make the same composition mistake I did with the earlier painting because I didn't measure or plan ahead that time.

Next, I added some tone to the grass area with raw sienna, and then I negatively painted their outlines with grey, and then tried to create some bushes behind the grass... but I really wasn't pleased the how the bushes looked, and I wasn't sure how I was going to fix them.

In real life, the shrubs and bushes weren't compact and cloud-like, unlike what was on my painting... so I figured that I needed to make them sharper and more "twiggy" looking. I did the best thing I could think of to fix the look of the bushes: negative painting. I used a fairly dark colour to paint around and fix up the outline and shape of the bushes. I was super pleased with the result! I gave the bushes a rounded shape and made it look like their branches fan out from the base -- I think that is what really gives them their bush/shrub appearance instead of just looking like sticks or grass. I thought that the bushes ended up looking frosty and that made me happy!

But, now I didn't really like those weird shadows behind the bushes, so I kept working on it until it looked more seamless and uniform in the background.

I was painting this on paper that I've only used a handful of times and it's not really my cup-of-tea because I find it's a bit fussy and less forgiving than my trusty favourite paper (Canson Moulin du Roy CP)... however, I do love the look of the pronounced texture that this paper has. I've found less is more when it comes to working with this paper (handmade cotton Indigo Art Paper) as the paint lifts awfully easy if you want to do glazes or do layering, and also the integrity of the paper gets lost quickly if you have to do any lifting/scrubbing. I'm used to (maybe too used to) being able to easily lift up paint and fix mistakes whilst still being able to do lots of layering and the integrity of the paper holding up well with the Moulin du Roy paper.

When the shrub area was pretty good, I started working on the tall trees. This place that I was painting had both spruce trees and tamarack trees. I hadn't painted tamarack trees before (especially without their green summer needles), so I wanted to give that a try. I didn't really want the tamarack trees to just look like dead spruce trees since they're in their winter state... so I thought if I gave the limbs some soft/rounded volume unlike the sharp stick branches of dead trees, maybe viewers familiar with tamaracks would recognize that that's what they are. I don't know if it worked, but either way, it's alright if people perceive them as dead trees. I could have made the tamaracks darker... I will probably do that next time.

I painted the foreground tamaracks first, then the background trees, and last, the foreground spruce. I was quite pleased with how the spruce trees turned out!

Once the background was good, I finished up the foreground. I made shadows at the bases of the shrubs and reeds to add dimension and contrast between the sections.

One of my favourite things about these reeds/grasses is their arched heads - I think it's really pretty. I included some of the other colours from the painting in the stems of the foremost reeds to tie everything together; some blue, pink and some green... I also added some violet, but I didn't like it. The violet was a bit much, and there wasn't enough of it throughout the painting for it to look harmonious. I went over the purple with some raw umber and some green, and that toned it down nicely. I really like how those other colours peak through the reeds just barely noticeable.

The last thing to do was to add some finishing details. I used white gouache to make some frosty twigs and branches. I really like the added detail, dimension, and fullness that these simple brushstrokes of gouache give this painting!

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Thanks so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed this blog post and found it insightful!

- Cheyenne