Notes on Drawing Light in Winter

Winter light is very generous. It hands you exactly one warm source and then throws everything else into blue.

The problem with snow

Snow is not white. This is the thing that took me longest to accept. Snow is a reflector, and a reflector only shows you what is pointed at it — which in a winter scene is usually a sky with nothing interesting in it.

So a snow field at night is not a white field. It is a very large, very dim, slightly blue thing. Paint it white and you lose the lantern entirely.

A practical test

Squint at a reference image until the subject disappears. Whatever is left is the actual light of the scene. Do that enough times and the “white” resolves into four or five separate greys.

The lantern

The lantern is a problem before it is a solution. Its job is to be the only warm thing in the frame, and the only reliable way to do that is to give it enough glow that it slightly overexposes.

Some things that worked:

• Let the lantern blow out completely. A clipped highlight reads as bright.
• Warm the snow near it and cool the snow far from it, rather than warming everything uniformly.
• Keep the darkest value in the frame out of the sky — put it in the trees.

If the whole picture feels cold, the problem is rarely that you need more warm light. It is that the darks are in the wrong place.

Colour temperature

I keep a small swatch card with six greys on it — not a colour picker, just six squares of paper with a little of each mixed on them. It sits under the lamp.

The ratio I end up using most often is roughly:

• 3 parts cold grey for the snow
• 2 parts mid grey for the trees and the far hills
• 1 part warm orange for the lantern

The reference for all of it is a photograph of a lamp on a bench, taken at about nine in the evening, in a light drizzle.

On repetition

I drew this scene eleven times over two weeks. The first version was the idea, the fourth was competent, and the ninth was actually good. The tenth and the eleventh were worse, because I had started correcting things that were not broken.

There is no reliable way to know which pass is the last one. You just have to put the drawing down for a while and come back.