First snow on the auto shop

Today we got the first real snow of the season, it accumulated on the ground and on top of cars and trees. By now it has melted with steady rain, and it seems like warmer weather is ahead. Being the first wintery painting of the season I had to make some adjustments to the setup. The clean water has salt in it, and I put the brush directly into the container as I paint. This is to avoid having to pour water into the small glass container that I usually use. Trying to do that with giant mitts on is not feasible. I have a second container for dirty water, so I try to judge when I need clean and when I can use the dirty water. Its a bit technical, but water management is crucial to getting clean colours when painting more than one on a trip. The other consideration is the subject matter. I have to pick a scene that I know I can paint in one layer more or less. That precludes overlapping one object on another, which requires that the first layer dries. If you study this painting, you can see than most of the objects are cleverly surrounded in a layer of snow, which is just the paper showing through. In doing so, it prevents the colour areas from running together. Its been so many years now that I developed an entirely different approach to painting in the summer versus the winter. In the past it took a long adjustment time to adapt to seasonal changes, so I was happy that this one turned out all right. The one thing that I need to get used to is the cold, even at barely -1 Celsius I was feeling it. I painted at -26 Celsius earlier in the year, although its not a record that I want to break!

First snow on the auto shop, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, November 2023 (3483_1b)