Watch as Graham Cox demonstrates a simple snow scene in pastel and pastel pencil in this video to accompany his Leisure Painter April 2021 article.

Snow scenes, naturally, can look very cold and uninviting, but there are ways to counteract this. One method is to reach for your artistic licence and add contrasting warm colours into the sky, leaving the other areas of the picture as they are. The other way could be to inject contrasting warm colours into the picture in the form of dead foliage or vegetation, which was my choice for this demonstration.

The finished painting

Winter Landscape, pastel on pastel paper, (20x20cm)

For this painting the pastel paper was taped to a piece of smooth board along the top and bottom. I propped the board at an angle of approximately 40 degrees and placed a piece of newspaper under the bottom of the board to catch stray pastel dust.

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Follow Graham to paint a Lakeland barn by clicking here.

For more inspiring snow scene demonstrations, click here.