There’s snow on the ground as I write this. Let’s dive deep on snow shadows!
As I mentioned in Nature Notebook: Snow!, snow shadows depend on lighting conditions and reflect the sky. On an overcast day (i.e. when it’s actually snowing), snow on the ground may not have visible shadows, or the shadows will be very diffuse and neutral gray. When it’s bright and sunny with a blue sky, the snow will show distinct bluish shadows: sometimes appearing violety, sometimes cyan, sometimes muted and other times shockingly vivid, with sparkling white highlights. It is these beautiful, ephemeral shadows I hope to capture in a color mix.
New inspo photos!
I went on a walk today to take some new snow shadow photos!
When the sun is out, shadows are stronger. The yellow color of afternoon sun made the shadows appear grayish as well.
In areas that are overall in diffuse shadow, such as areas under tree cover or when the sun is behind a cloud, the entire field of snow may have a more bluey appearance, with footsteps or indentations appearing darker and maybe having lighter wide ridges alongside.
Snow sparkles, so when the overall field of snow is lavender color, it still has little spots of bright white.
This street view, showing both sky and shadows in frame, shows how the shadows are more violet and muted than the sky, but there is a relationship there.
What I’m looking for in a paint mix
To recap, my observations of snow shadows that I’d like to capture in a color mix:
- Sparkling appearance.
- Somehow looks cyan and violet at the same time.
- Somehow looks muted and bright at the same time.
That’s a lot to ask of paint! A granulating mix with color separation could help with a lot of these goals, so I will mainly focus on mixes with a granulating color. It also seems like we will need both a cyan and a pink or violet, so that also steers us in a direction.
Color Mixes
Cobalt Violet + Manganese Blue
This is Zoltan Szabo’s mix of choice, according to Zoltan Szabo’s 70 Favorite Watercolor Techniques. I think he used original Manganese Blue, PB33; the closest I can come is Da Vinci’s Manganese Blue Mixture (PB33, PB15). The mix is highly granulating, which is great for sparkle. It’s easy to go too purple, specifically lilac, but I think the lower left mix achieves the right balance of pink and blue, with an overall appearance of light blue but still showing some separation of each color.
Limitations of this mix are that it does not get darker and it is overall too high chroma I think.
Cobalt Violet + Cerulean Blue
A variation on Zoltan Szabo’s favorite mix, using the more commonly available Cerulean Blue. It’s also slightly less vibrant, which is good for this mix, I think.
The granulation is absolutely wild here; a top mix for texture. More so even than the Manganese Mix, though perhaps not as extreme as a Szabo’s full-on Manganese would have been.
Permanent Alizarin + Cerulean Blue
I was inspired to try this mix by Shari Blaukopf. Actually, she uses a three-color mix with Holbein Permanent Alizarin Crimson, DS Cerulean Blue, and DS Indanthrone Blue, to achieve more darkness and lower chroma. But I think this two-color mix shows a lot of promise on its own.
The crimson, which is made from a pink deepened by red-brown, does a little work of slightly muting the Cerulean, while also making it more violet. The heavy granulation, especially in the more Cerulean mixes, looks pretty sparkly to me. It doesn’t just turn purple as mixes with PV19 rose alone do, instead taking on a strange mix of blue and red.
I love these colors, but I think maybe they are too high-chroma, which I guess is why Blaukopf added the Indanthrone. But there is a certain magic in the way the cyan granulation floats above the lavender hue.
Pyrrol Rubin + Cerulean Blue
This is promising!
Whenever I paint with Alizarin Crimson alternatives and find the mixes too violet or high-chroma, the next step is to try Pyrrol Rubin (PR264), which is just that much more red and mixes grayer with cyans. The bluer mixes seem useful for the lower-chroma distant shadows, but I didn’t get as much granulation here.
Quin Violet (PV19) + Phthalo Turquoise (PB16)
This mix occurred to me in the field during the January 2024 Nature Spot Challenge, where I found the mix of Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) and Quin Violet (PV19) useful for swinging between a muted violet and a strikingly bright cyan.
There is no granulating paint here, but the diluted light blues and violets still somehow end up looking cyan-and-violet-at-the-same-time – an effect which could be enhanced by letting the colors mix on the page. The moody Quin Violet also lends these mixes a grayness which is helpful for realism.
Phthalo Blue Red Shade (PB15:1) + Quin Coral (PR209)
Slightly less grayed out than the PB16 mixes, I think these his a nice cool gray-violet. I am also likely to use PBRS in a blue sky, so using it in the clouds mix offers a nice symmetry.
It occurs to me that this is a similar exercise to the one I did in Mixing Mauve for Watercolor Clouds.
Straight up diluted Indanthrone Blue
Why overthink it?
Conclusion
I may be looking for different mixes for different situations: close-up shadows and distant shadows.
This photo contrasts the immediate, blue, sharp shadows of footsteps with the more distant, grayer shadows of trees.
Close Up View
- Granulation really matters to show the sparkle.
- Tend to contain pops of light cyan.
Cerulean Blue is not a color I use that often generally, but I found myself reaching for it again and again in this mixes because its qualities are just what I need in snow: high granulation, low value range, moderate chroma, cyan hue. It worked well with nearly everything I threw at it.
Distance Views
- Sparkle is not as visible, so granulation is not as important.
- Chroma is lower altogether.
- I’m more likely to see the sky in the same frame, so it’s useful to have a mix that contains the same pigments I would use for the sky
For this latter reason, colors like Phthalo Blue RS and Turquoise came in handy, and their lack of granulation didn’t matter as much. There are many violets, pinks, or reds which could add the violet tones to these colors, but my favorites were those that had a certain orange-toned quality that allowed them to also mute the chroma of the blue.