How to Depict Colored Lights in Snow Paint

The lights on this Christmas tree brighten up a cold winter night.

From the historical American landscape paintings of Currier and Ives to the modern "painter of light," Thomas Kinkade, the image of festive lights glowing beneath a blanket of snow has always been heartwarming and dreamy. With a little bit of practice, you can create this effect within your own painting so that you can enjoy the peaceful feeling of colorful, illuminated fresh snow all year long.

Things You'll Need

• Canvas board
• Acrylic paint
• Large round brush
• Medium round brush
• Small flat brush
• Mixing palette
• Jar of water

Instructions

Painting Colored Lights in Snow

1. Squeeze the appropriate acrylic paint colors onto your mixing palette. This will not only be determined by the color of lights you wish to create, but also plenty of white for the snow and a variety of greens and brown, assuming your colored lights are hanging on a bush or tree.

2. 

   Colored lights, illuminated under snow, are cheerful and welcoming.

   Choose the area of your painting that focuses on the snow-covered lights. Because your canvas is already a plain, flat and uninspiring white, you will want to create a base, or "wash," of green. This will provide dimension and act as an area to house your lights, as lights are usually hanging on a bush or a tree.

3. Dip the large round brush into a heavy mixture of green, using plenty of water from the jar. Spread the green mixture in the area where the foliage holding the lights exists.

4. Take the previously used brush, still wet with green paint, and scoop up a generous amount of white paint. Dip this paint-filled brush into the jar of water and immediately transfer to spread over the areas where the snow rests, usually in a blanket along the top half of the bush. There will be some smearing, which is the desired effect. Allow the surface to dry completely before continuing.

5. Dip your medium round brush into one of the featured light colors. Randomly spread small oval shapes across the surface of the snow-covered foliage. Be sure to make some of the shapes barely visible and some more predominant, as the strings of lights are woven in and out of the depths of the branches. Choose the next colors, one by one, and repeat this process with each color.

6. Dip your medium round brush into the water, scoop up another generous portion of white paint, dip the brush into the water again, and immediately transfer to the snowy area with lights. Circle the brush around the edges of half the lights, highly defining them, and sweep the brush very lightly and quickly directly over the remaining lights. This will allow some of the lights to pop out and some to appear buried beneath the snow.

7. Dab the small flat brush into the green and brown paint, one after the other. Move the brush to the illuminated foliage and create random crosshatching and small lines in select areas where the blades of the foliage exist. It's best to do this in areas surrounding the lights to create depth and re-create the texture of the bush.

8. Take the small flat brush and slightly outline portions of select colored lights with a slightly darker version of the original color. This will provide a bit of contrast to the overwhelming white. Be sure to leave the majority of smeared and muted lights as is so that they appear covered in snow, struggling to shine.

Tips & Warnings

• Add rough and random semicircles and short strokes of white paint to create a fresh snowfall.

Resources

• Thomas Kinkade paintings
• Currier and Ives paintings