The Colours Of Nuuk

It's really cold outside today but I wanted to do some watercolour painting, so I picked some subject matter that had lots of simple shapes and where I might be able to get away with just three layers of paint. I'm back in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, which means it's another outing for my tundra supergranulators.  Today they're supplemented by Indian yellow from my regular palette.

As you can probably tell (or guess), I started by putting down a pencil drawing and reserving lots of whites with masking fluid.  I also spattered on a little bit of masking fluid for some snowy effects.

I didn't start from the sky and work my way forwards today.  Instead I started from the buildings.  In reality they're quite a bright yellow and green, so I used Indian yellow to brighten them.  I applied a single layer of Indian over all the yellow and green areas, the idea being that this would unify the houses.  After this I put on a second layer: tundra orange for the yellow buildings and tundra green for the green ones.  I'd already tried these glazes out on some scrap paper.  For the roofs I used tundra violet and for the grey walls at the bottom some mix of tundra blue, pink and violet.  I added shadows on planes not facing the sun and on the underside of the roofs: tundra blue on the yellow buildings and tundra violet on the green ones.

Then came the really interesting stuff: the sky and the snow.  In the top half of the painting, I used tundra blue, pink and violet.  Mainly the blue and the pink.   My source photo had no sky in it, only snow, but I deviated from this, liking the idea of having common colours within the sky and snow and of letting the two merge into each other in places.  I was careful to leave a long, hard edged horizon line in a few places, though, just to make it clear that this really was sky and snow.  I also sprinkled some salt on the snow to exaggerate the difference between the two areas.

For the snow at the bottom, I was more adventurous, dropping in some tundra green and tundra violet in addition to the other three tundra colours.  I still threw on some salt though.

As final steps after removing all the masking fluid, I put some tundra pink and blue into the snow on the rooftops and some tundra blue along one side of any unmasked white lines that were feeling too thick.  And then I was done.

And, oh yes, this one is a success and is going up for sale.  The lost edges between the sky and the snow worked exactly how I wanted them to.  The man made buildings contrast against their untamed surroundings.  But they also fit in because they're colourful and some of those colours are reflected in the snow.  I'm glad I ventured outside today, even if it was freezing.

Twelve Angry Men

I saw this film on the telly the other day.  Twelve Angry Men.  It was released in 1957 and is a masterpiece.  Twelve members of a jury debate a case and unanimously find the defendant not guilty after a vote at the start reveals an 11-1 majority in favour of guilty.  The cast is pretty well restricted t9 these twelve actors and the location restricted to a meeting room.  The twelve jurors all have different personalities and these personalities are revealed gradually rather than all being dumped on us at the beginning.  It is a brilliant film and I decided pretty quickly after it had finished that it would make a good painting.

I started by carefully dividing up the paper and masking off twelve separate squares.  I arranged my twelve source photos carefully, so that people were looking towards the middle of the painting rather than off the edges. Bit would have been easy to order the portraits in the same order that the jurors sat around the table but that wouldn’t have worked.  It took me four days to complete the painting, doing three portraits a day.

I only used four colours, the same four as for David Suchet, and each colour was applied in two layers.  So that was delft blue, then dark pthalo green, dark red and helio blue reddish, then all four again in the same order.  The first couple of layers were only applied in the darkest places but I later applied colours in the mid-time areas and started applying more pressure in the dark areas.  I added some background colours for variety and to create light/dark contrasts in places.  After all twelve portraits were finished, I smoothed over the colours with a paper stump and removed the masking tape.  And that was me done.

Let's go through the twelve portraits, row by row and left to right:

1. Martin Balsam played the foreman.  Not a great likeness but the jaunty tue makes him unmistakeable.

2. John Fiedler played the meek bank clerk.  Again not a great likeness but it's a good looking portrait, and there's some personality coming through, albeit not necessarily the personality in the film.  And his glasses, which I marked out with a pointy tool, came out well.

3. Edward Binns, one who stands up to bullies.  I've got more of a likeness here and the highlights in t(e hair look great.

4. Henry Fonda, the film's protagonist, the only juror to initially vote not guilty and the guy who convinces everyone else to switch their vote.  There's a bit of likeness there.

5. First in the second row is E. G. Marshall, playing a stockbroker who's only interested in facts, not opinions.  Quite close to a likeness.  I should have left his glasses as white grooves on the paper rather than filling them in though.

6. Ed Begley played the racist.  One of the best moments in the film is where he goes off on a bigoted rant and the other jurors get up one at a time, walk to the edges of the room and turn their backs in him.  Not a great likeness but an interesting portrait.

7. Lee J. Cobb played a bully who had driven his own son out of his life.  The juror most passionately believing the defendant was guilty.  A great acting performance.  Unfortunately this is the worst of the twelve portraits.  No likeness, no personality, nothing interesting.

8. Robert Webber, the easily distracted creative type.  A little bit of likeness there and a little bit of personality.

9. Joseph Sweeney, the wise old man.  I've picked up part of the personality but not much likeness.

10. George Voskovec, the European immigrant. I've absolutely nailed the likeness and personality here, maybe because I've zoomed in a bit, leaving me with more room to work in.

11. Jack Warden, the wisecracking salesman who would rather be at the baseball game.  Got a bit of Phil Collins going on there.  The personality is on point though.

12. Jack Klugman as the guy who grew up in the slums.  Not got the likeness or the personality but the is a personality of some sort there.

So the likenesses are in short supply.  It turns out to be quite difficult to get likenesses on such a small scale.  On the other hand, working on this scale does teach you something about portraits.  You learn to look for what's important and out this in every time.  The line of the mouth, the shadow below the bottom lip, the nostrils, a couple of shapes on the ears, the shadow between the eye and the brow, simple u-shaped irises.  I feel like I've become a better portrait artist at the end of this exercise.  And, while individual portraits haven't nailed the likenesses, the set of twelve has nailed the likeness of the jury.  These four colours are great for monotone portraits and the combination of this paper, the four colours and the smoothing paper stumps, results in a blurry lack of focus that evokes old black-and-white films.  Of course there's colour too, making the portraits look like partly coloured in black and white stills.

This one's going up for sale.

View From Highest Point, Queendown Warren

Another plein air painting day today.  I'm back in Queendown Warren again, but to keep things interesting I'm using watercolour rather than oil pastel and looking out across the valley rather than hanging around in the woods.  The views here are amazing but what makes a great view out of the window doesn’t always make a great painting.  And, at least for me, these views across the valley are just a bit lacking in interesting shapes.  Still, they're a convenient as a painting subject as I'm currently walking from home to the far end of the Warren and back six times most weeks.  Maybe when I've lost more weight (43 pounds down, 26 pounds to go until I reach my university rowing weight), and am feeling up to going for short runs rather than long walks, I'll have more time in my day and be able to go back to painting other local scenes.

Anyway, today I thought I'd paint in the key of green warm with Winsor blue (green shade), raw sienna and Winsor red.  The blue is a new palette member and has been itching to make its full debut.  I picked raw sienna as, of all my three transparent yellows, it was the one most able to dampen down what is a highly saturated blue.  For the red I wanted something warm because I was more interested in oranges than purples and I chose Winsor ahead of rose dore after looking through much notes at what oranges and neutrals those two reds could give me with much choices of blue and yellow.

I was also wanting to try something new today.  After some feedback from Liron Yanconsky, I wanted to try painting with low saturation colours.  So I mixed up a neutral colour from my three primaries (mimicking Liron's dirty palette) and used this as a base for all of my colours.  So if, for example, I needed a yellow, I'd mix raw sienna into the neutral colour until I reached something worth using.  That was the plan.

I forgot to bring the iPad out with me, so was unable to plan my painting  with cropping and gridding.  Instead I did everything by eye, putting down some rough, inaccurate shapes in pencil to guide me.  I protected some bits of buildings and fences with masking fluid.  And then I was ready to go.

I started with an underpainting, including the sky.  The blue is too intense on its own to use in the sky, so I tried to put in some grey clouds and to have a bit of raw sienna along the horizon.  I wasn't happy with what ended up as quite a dark looking sky and tried to dab out some white clouds, all to no avail as my red and blue were both stainers.  I should have worked this out in the planning stage rather than allowing myself to be blindsided.  Anyway, I worked down the paper with an underpainting.  Another problem with a scene like this is that it doesn't allow me to go as crazy with the underpainting as I do when painting buildings.  Or maybe it does and I was just suppressing my creativity.

After this, it was all about adding two or three more layers of colour and, at least in theory, adding more detail.  For some of the tree lines, I used my watercolour test paper as a mask for the bottom of the tree line along the edges of fields, which seemed to work.  I filled out so many of those tree lines with coniferous trees, though, that it made everything a bit samey.

After the second layer had been added, I realised that my choice of three colours wasn't working.  Or maybe the weather had changed and the sun had come out.  Because the actual view looked a lot sunnier than what I had down on the paper.  At this point I introduced Indian yellow to the team in an attempt to warm things up.  So my painting's no longer in the key of  green warm.  Because there's probably just as much raw sienna in there as Indian yellow, I can't really call it orange cool either.  This just isn't a three colour painting.  Anyway, I tried to brighten up the sky first, which obviously it towards green.  And then I introduced Indian yellow to the sunniest fields and on the left of some of the tree shapes.  I got a marginal improvement.

And then there's the big shape at the bottom, which was supposed to be three separate tree shapes but which I approached planlessly and ended up filling with neutral colour.  Scraping out trees with a credit card didn’t get me anywhere interesting, so instead I stabbed in dry paint with the Merlin brush, using Indian yellow and my four opaques: cadmium yellow, cadmium red, sepia and titanium white.  As a finishing touch (and one that I always apply to failed paintings but occasionally to successes) I spattered on all four opaque colours.  And then I packed up in disgust.

Because this painting was a failure.  A big failure.  I didn't think about what colours to use, staining properties, putting down a decent drawing, what I was going to do about the foreground…  it's one big long list of mistakes brought about through laziness.  If I paint another view across this valley, I'll be using the Shire supergranulators.  I want to forget this one quickly and produce something better so it doesn't get to sit at the top of my blog for too long.

Chalk Face, Queendown Warren

I've been waiting a while for today to come round.  The weather forecast was for the warmest day of the year so far and I've been itching to head outside for some plein air painting and, in particular, some plein air oil pastel painting.  My application to Landscape Artist Of The Year this year is probably going to be based on oil pastels, so I wanted both some plein air practice and the chance to upgrade one or more of the paintings that I'm planning to include in my application.  So once I was up and dressed, I filled my rucksack with the necessary gear and walked over to the Warren.

I'd already decided that today's painting was going to be in the woods rather than on one side of the valley with hinge long views as the latter seemed more suited to watercolour.  So I had a wander around the woods and, in particular the area around a huge chalk-walled pit, before settling on this view.  It was the chalk face that attracted me to this view: it made an interesting shape and could contrast sharply against any adjacent darks.

I started with a 3x4 grid of squares on the paper.  Then I took a couple of photos of the view using the iPad, one in portrait format and one in landscape.  I tried cropping both of them to rectangles in 3 vs 4 proportion, playing around to see what I could come up with with the chalk face one third of the way in from each edge.  I decided I preferred the portrait format, so saved the photo, then put it through an app that drew a gross of 12 squares over the top.  Using the iPad like this helps me to get decent compositions: that's what's so great about doing this for landscapes.  For portraits, the benefit is, of course, a better likeness.

And then it was on to the pastels.  Just like with watercolour, I generally worked from back to front but, just like with coloured pencils, I didn't stick strictly to this and wandered around the painting.  At one point, I had the sky, the background greenery, and some initial bottom layer colour in the pit and over the middleground.  Things were looking pretty ugly at this stage and it was a bit unfortunate that this was when I got my one and only passer by of the day.  Oh well.  Anyway, I should also say that all the colours I had down at this point were mixes of at least three colours - this is the way to go with oil pass.

Anyway, after Sue and her dog had wandered off, I decided I needed to escape from the ugly stage by putting in the trees.  The leaves are all sorts of different greens and yellows stippled in, trying to get darker colours on the right and on the bottom of clumps and yellows on the top of clumps and on the left.  For the trunks, I had fun throwing in all sorts of colours, including my two favourites, delft blue and deep red.  Once. Once the trunk colours were down, I three dimensionalised the trunks using a pointy rubber tool, which wobbled from side to side while moving along the trunks.  This is a technique I made up on the spot and worked so well that I'll definitely be using it again.

At this point the painting was looking in good shape and all I had left to do was to fill in the remaining middleground and foreground shapes.  Most of them were quite straightforward.  I'd just make loads of marks with whatever colours I could see or that I liked and then smoothed them over with fingers or rubber tools.

Where I had most trouble was with the foreground.  I tried all sorts of techniques here, trying to get the impression of a leafy forest floor.  I tried stabbing in loads of leaves in autumn colours.  That didn't work.  Nor did doing the same thing with wild impressionistic colours.  Nor did smoothing out those wild impressionistic colours with a finger (and I tried both stripy and swirly smoothing).  Nor did scraping out shapes in the resulting mud with a scalpel or credit card.  In the end I reached for my favourite blue and red plus some greens, a yellow and a white and put down some semi random colours.  I say semi random because I tried to make a path into the painting with the white pastel and to use dark colours for contrast next to the chalk wall.  And then I took a rubber tool and smoothed out the colours in weird right to left wavy zigzags. And this worked!  On the left anyway.  I needed a couple more attempts to get it to work on the right.

And obviously every time I got frustrated with the foreground I'd step away from it and spot on some more leaves in the trees until I'd cooled down.  This is what I mean by not sticking strictly to working from back to front and instead wandering around the painting.  Oh, and that brown bit of cliff face to the left of the chalk was also a problem at times, needing a few attempts until I got to something that seemed to fit with the rest of the painting (that pinkish light English red is fast heading up my list of favourites).

And that was me done.  I was surprised when I looked at the time.  I don't know what time I started but it was now 2pm.  Time had flown.  The resulting painting feels like a success and is going in the shop window.  I don't think it's done well enough to be included in my LAOTY entry though, so maybe I'll be returning soon to the Warren for another painting using the lessons learned today

David Suchet

It's still too cold to be out painting, so I'm indoors with the coloured pencils again.  And, to be honest, I could do with having more portraits near the top of the blog (and pushing Stuart Broad off the bottom) just in case Portrait Artist Of The Year judges are looking.  Hi guys!  Ignore what I said about Stuart Broad!  And I do need to start doing some timed portraits if I'm not to embarrass myself on PAOTY if I'm to make it to Battersea.

Poirot was on the telly in the background at one point yesterday while I was reading a book and he's been stuck in my head since then.  I googled around this morning and found a source photo of David Suchet as Poirot that was in black and white and almost chiaroscuro like.  I especially liked the lost edges along the top front of his head.  So that inspired me into doing this painting.

After having so much fun on the Moeen Ali painting applying multiple layers of colour in the beard and the background and ending up with neutral colours that, when examined closely, we’re made up of marks from lots of individual colours, I thought I’d try something similar for the darkest areas in this one.  There are four colours in there: delft blue, dark pthalo green, dark red and helio blue reddish.  I just started with the blue, green and red that were screaming out most to me, then thought that the resulting colour needed more blue, so added that second blue.  After this, I was so happy with the resulting colour that I added one more layer of each of the four colours rather than introducing new ones.

The tache, eyebrows and hair also had two layers of these four colours applied but in the second layer of each colour, I was trying to introduce some hairy textures rather than just making the colours deeper.  And for the colours in the face, I just used those same four colours again: this painting uses only four colours!  In several places on the face, I was using the pencils edge on and trying to sculpt the shape of the head.

When this was all done, I had something I was happy with.  But rather than stop there, I smoothed out the colours with a paper stump.  It didn't make things any better but, more importantly, it didn't make things any worse either.

And I'm really pleased with the final result.  There's the likeness, the lost edge along the top of the head and a blurry lack of focus around the dinner suit that makes this look like a very old photograph, adding a 1920s feel that a TV director would kill for.  This one is up for sale.

Oh, and timing-wise, this took two and a half hours with a couple of short breaks, which bodes well for any future appearance on PAOTY.

Moeen Ali, The Beard To Be Feared

I'm back to cricket player portraits today.  After my disastrous Stuart Broad portrait, I'm having another attempt at a bowler who could bat for me at number eight.  I’ve gone for Moeen Ali, also known as The Beard To Be Feared.  He's one of only three men ever to have both taken a hat trick and scored a century for the England test team, the only others being, let's see, Johnny Briggs and, oh, Stuart Broad.  Bringing Moeen in for Broad means my XI once completed will have two spinners in the bowling attack, but that's perfectly fine at certain grounds, most notably those in the Subcontinent.

This painting took about six hours, just like the last one.  I started with using the grid method to put down initial outlines, then scratched a few stray hair marks into the beard area.  Then I blocked in some of the larger areas of colour to give me an early sense of progress.  After that, I finally started properly by working on the eyes.  If you can get them right, you're well on the way to getting a good likeness.  During this part of the painting, I'm magnifying my source photo on the iPad to help me get things exactly right.

Once the eyes are right, it's a case of working my way around the rest of the painting in no particular order and not needing to finish one area before starting the next.  This is where I just drift away into a world of my own, beavering away with light layers of colour until I realise three or four hours have gone by and I need a break.

The places where I get most in the zone are those where I just add multiple layers of (generally) uniform colour over big areas.  Look at those two neutral bands of colour in  the background.  Each of them has at least six colour in there, all of them different.  Whenever I got bored with part of the face, I'd look at those bands and ask myself which new colours I needed to add to get them closer to the neutral colours in my source photo.

And then there's the beard.  I was determined not to use black in there.  Instead, I started with violets, blues, reds and greens.  I think with the greens, I used three different ones, blending them into each other from left to right.  Whenever I found myself reaching for an interesting colour to use in Mo's face or clothes, I'd add it to the beard.  And it came out brilliantly, with those scratched in hair marks all showing clearly.

For finishing touches, I smoothed out the colours in the clothes and background with paper stumps, then burnished all over the skin with some sort of ivory colour.  I didn't smooth or burnish the beard, not wanting to spoil what I already had.  Instead I scribbled on some sepia marks in places just to make some bits darker than others.  Looking at the painting afterwards, the skin was looking too orangey and the clothes were looking a bit disconnected from the face, so I burnished all the clothes and face in ivory.  I know this shouldn't be possible for the face, which had already been burnished but it did seem to work.

Before the final verdict, I feel I should say something about the paper I'm using.  I bought it in Hobbycraft, it's made by Seawhite's of Brighton and I think it may be cold pressed watercolour paper but don't quote me on that.  And it works brilliantly, at least for me.  It’s capacity isn't too high, which means two things: first, that my time painting is limited to about six hours because after that the paper won't let in any more colour and, second, that my coloured paintings have this quite soft looking appearance, still looking like colour pencil paintings and not like some other medium.  But the best thing about this paper is the tooth and the way that it shows up through my pencils.  There's a texture all over this painting that I really like.  It's like a patina.  And even the white highlights around the edge of the beard are something that the paper put there, not me.

Anyway, I rate this one a success and it's up for sale.

And as for the cricket XI, all I need now is a second opening batsman.  I still haven't decided who it will be.

Annual Self Portrait 2023

It's that time of year when a certain job comes up.  It's time for the annual self portrait, something that I've been looking forward to for a while.  Somehow self portraits are so much more than portraits of other people.

This year the portrait is in coloured pencil for the first time ever.  The pose is an upward looking one of me in my favourite chair at home.  I took the photo with my iPad.  I decided to take off my t-shirt first because some people had been giving me stick about how long it would be before I painted myself naked. The photo came out brilliantly from an artist's perspective.  First, the face is divided into lots of shapes.  This doesn’t just make for an interesting painting but also makes it easier to break down the job and to keep track of things - something especially important when using a slow medium like coloured pencil.  Second, the flash from the iPad threw up lots of interesting light and colour patterns on the face.  How could anyone not want to paint me now?

In reality the wall behind me was magnolia and the chair black, but I went for colours that I could see in the photo rather than the real ones.  The wall has several layers of colour in it: a grey, a blue, two reds, a yellow, a green and a layer that was one green on one side and a different green on the other.

For the face, I started with the eyes, looking to get them as accurate as possible.  Just as every year, my right eye looks fine but my left is a bit weird.  I'm starting to think it might really be weird - this is too much of a coincidence.  Once I was happy with the eyes, I started on the rest of the face.  I put on loads of layers of colour, all with quite soft pressure and holding the pencils a long way from the tops.  It takes a lot of patience but it's the only way to a great coloured pencil painting.  I had great fun throwing in all the weird colours I could see in the photo, including blues around the eyes, greens between the mouth and nose and lots of purples in the shadows.

After two 2-3 hour sessions, I decided I was close to finishing.  The paper was starting to feel full with colour, even though it might not look it.  So at this point I blended all the background colours with a paper stick thing and burnished all over the face with ivory.  As a finishing touch, I scratched out a few hairs with a craft knife in the eyebrows and nostril.  And that was me done.

I must say I'm really pleased with this one.  There's the likeness, the colours and the Gil Kane style up-the-nose angle, but there's also the way it's telling a story.  The angle, the lighting, the lack of a t-shirt the look in the right eye: it's as if I've just heard a noise upstairs and have stopped what I'm doing to listen.  And that's before we start wondering whether I’m sat there naked.  This one's a big success in my book but won't be going up for sale as nobody's going to want me up on their wall.  It is, though, being entered into the 2024 Derwent Art Prize.  Let's see how that goes.

And, of course, I should take this opportunity to compare this self portrait to previous ones.  I thought last year's couldn't be beaten but it may well have been.

Painting Watercolour Snow Scenes The Easy Way, Terry Harrison - Book Review

I bought another book this week.  It's been down near the bottom of my wishlist for a while but when the price suddenly fell to £7.41 I jumped in and grabbed it.  It's a 128 page paperback.  And it's a thing of beauty, with the colours of the margins and of the background behind the text carefully chosen to blend in with all the paintings on the same page.  I knew this book was aimed at the relative beginner but thought there would be enough in there for me to make it worth buying. Let's see what's in there.

We start with about 40 pages of introduction.  On the face of it, most of this is about materials, including 20 pages talking about Terry's range of brushes.  I see reviews of this book on Amazon complaining about how this book is a glorified advertisement for Terry's brushes and how no body can paint snow scenes without them.  Have people even read the book?  Terry actually says that you don't need to buy these brushes if you have your own brushes that perform similar roles.  That's my first point.  My second is that those 20 pages aren't about the brushes - they're about what to do with them.  Some early tips from Terry on techniques and on what elements to include in a painting.  It's not an introduction disguised as a catalogue: it's the start of the meat of the book but disguised as an introduction.

We then get onto the next section.  30 pages on techniques including glowing skies, masking fluid trees, dry brushwork tracks, snowdrifts, silver birches and extra little elements to include to make snow scenes more twee and Christmassy.  There's plenty of interesting stuff in there.

And finally we have about 60 pages of demos.  There are six very different demos, and each is followed by a couple of similar paintings where Terry talks about compositional things.  Most of demos have about 20 steps, although there's one with only 12.  The demos are instructional in tone and very specific about which colours and brushes to use.  People reading this know this rattles my cage but I knew what to expect this time and this is, after all, a book aimed at relative beginners.  And I didn't mind these demos actually.  I found it useful to hear exactly which colours Terry had used where (and he does vary the colours around).

On the subject of colours, Terry's palette works for me.  He has some greens in there but these see little use in his snow paintings and I'd be happy to mix greens from my primaries.  He uses a lot of burnt umber, burnt sienna and raw sienna; these colours sit in my palette and are a bit underused at the moment but Terry might just have pushed me into giving them some more action.  Terry uses a lot (and I really mean a lot) of cobalt blue.  This colour's not in my palette at the moment but I do have a tube of it floating around, so I'll probably use it all up on snow paintings, then test out the four blues in my squad to see which works best for snow.  And finally, Terry has this "shadow" colour.  It looks like a neutrally purple and is made up of pthalo blue, cadmium red and Winsor yellow.  Terry doesn't seem to use it on its own, instead using it to desaturate brighter colours.  And that's got me thinking.  Once I've picked a red, blue and yellow for a painting, I can mix them together into a purpley neutral and use this as a base in the same way that Terry uses shadow.  And that's not really that different to the messy palette technique that Liron Yanconsky uses on YouTube.  Terry's just recommending we buy shadow paint off the peg because that's "the easy way" in the book title.

And I've not even mentioned the possibility of painting snow scenes using my tundra colours.  So much to do!

Time to bring it all together.  This is a book aimed at the relative beginner but I'd advise anyone reading it to do so with an independent mind, not as a sheep.  Think about whether your brushes can already do what Terry's can and think about whether your colours can already do what Terry's can.  Otherwise you're going to end up with too many brushes and too many colours.  As an experienced artist looking at the book, though, I find no shortage of ideas coming out of it: techniques, elements to include and a lot about unsaturated colours, whether it's using a messy Liron Yankonsky palette or just using more burnt umber and burnt sienna.  And I can just flick through the book and be inspired by Terry's paintings.

It's a surprisingly good book.  All self contained and covering everything you could possibly want from a book on snow scenes.  Oh, apart from spattering on masking fluid for falling snow, which doesn't get a mention, but for which we can forgive him.  You know what?  I'm going to surprise everyone and give this book four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨