Slant of Light

6x6 inches
Oil

You can view and purchase this painting here.

 It's still very autumny here in North Carolina, but now that we're a week into December I wanted to paint something wintry.  I could wait a long time for it to snow - some years we have none at all - so I worked from this photo reference. I think it's in the Oakwood area of Raleigh, but don't really remember.

A fun one to paint - barely any warm colors at all, although when I started mixing up paints I realized the snow was really a blue-green, not a blue-purple, so that keeps it from looking icy-cold. Cozy.

I'm not entirely happy with the house. My structures tend to be either too soft and mushroomy, or over-illustrated. I should have changed brushes to do the house - used something with a clean, thin edge, so I could make crisper corners. Oh well, next time... I'm remembering Laurel Daniel's excellent advice, which was: "fix your mistakes on the next painting."  It's good advice indeed - messing around with a painting after it's "done" rarely leads to a good outcome, for me. I usually put my finished paintings on the mantelpiece for a few days, so I can review them and decide if they need more work. Sometimes I'll see that one little thing that needs tweaking, but more often than not I choose to leave it alone. I've ruined more paintings than I've fixed by trying to edit after the fact.