Snow Frost

Snow Frost is adapted from a series of photos that I took last January, after we had a heavy snowfall followed by several days of 1/2 to 3/4 inch long hoar frost.  I am always amazed and delighted by this spectacular hoar frost, and end up taking lots of photos of it, without having any idea of how one could even begin to capture the beauty and wonder of it with paint and paper.  The combination with the snow gave me the opportunity to look at it as a challenge in representing depth, instead of the incredible delicacy of it that usually grabs my attention.

I spent far more time on this one than I usually find necessary !  I missed being able to convey a lot of information with one or two simple washes, and spent hours adjusting the constrast across the paper.  At first I was so wrapped-up in putting in the darks that I got way off base, and had to go back and turn a lot of those into mediums so that the roundness that I was after could appear.  Even when it seemed finshed, I was not quite happy with it, but could not decide what was bothering me.  Another missed vision, I guess !  After a week or so, I stood back from it, and realised that it did need just a hint of colour for the sky.  A greyed, very pale tint of ultramarine blue, applied in a mottled layer, made it much more acceptable.  I had nearly forgotten having painted it, when it appeared in the stack that I was showing my friend Stephanie, who commented that it looked quite rounded and that she really liked it.  Hooray for good friends, eh !   Now I need to mat and frame it, and it will become  something quite different, again.  Presumably even better......