Painting Watercolour Snow Scenes The Easy Way, Terry Harrison – Book Review

We start with about 40 pages of introduction.  On the face of it, most of this is about materials, including 20 pages talking about Terry’s range of brushes.  I see reviews of this book on Amazon complaining about how this book is a glorified advertisement for Terry’s brushes and how no body can paint snow scenes without them.  Have people even read the book?  Terry actually says that you don’t need to buy these brushes if you have your own brushes that perform similar roles.  That’s my first point.  My second is that those 20 pages aren’t about the brushes – they’re about what to do with them.  Some early tips from Terry on techniques and on what elements to include in a painting.  It’s not an introduction disguised as a catalogue: it’s the start of the meat of the book but disguised as an introduction.

We then get onto the next section.  30 pages on techniques including glowing skies, masking fluid trees, dry brushwork tracks, snowdrifts, silver birches and extra little elements to include to make snow scenes more twee and Christmassy.  There’s plenty of interesting stuff in there.

And finally we have about 60 pages of demos.  There are six very different demos, and each is followed by a couple of similar paintings where Terry talks about compositional things.  Most of demos have about 20 steps, although there’s one with only 12.  The demos are instructional in tone and very specific about which colours and brushes to use.  People reading this know this rattles my cage but I knew what to expect this time and this is, after all, a book aimed at relative beginners.  And I didn’t mind these demos actually.  I found it useful to hear exactly which colours Terry had used where (and he does vary the colours around).

On the subject of colours, Terry’s palette works for me.  He has some greens in there but these see little use in his snow paintings and I’d be happy to mix greens from my primaries.  He uses a lot of burnt umber, burnt sienna and raw sienna; these colours sit in my palette and are a bit underused at the moment but Terry might just have pushed me into giving them some more action.  Terry uses a lot (and I really mean a lot) of cobalt blue.  This colour’s not in my palette at the moment but I do have a tube of it floating around, so I’ll probably use it all up on snow paintings, then test out the four blues in my squad to see which works best for snow.  And finally, Terry has this “shadow” colour.  It looks like a neutrally purple and is made up of pthalo blue, cadmium red and Winsor yellow.  Terry doesn’t seem to use it on its own, instead using it to desaturate brighter colours.  And that’s got me thinking.  Once I’ve picked a red, blue and yellow for a painting, I can mix them together into a purpley neutral and use this as a base in the same way that Terry uses shadow.  And that’s not really that different to the messy palette technique that Liron Yanconsky uses on YouTube.  Terry’s just recommending we buy shadow paint off the peg because that’s “the easy way” in the book title.

And I’ve not even mentioned the possibility of painting snow scenes using my tundra colours.  So much to do!

Time to bring it all together.  This is a book aimed at the relative beginner but I’d advise anyone reading it to do so with an independent mind, not as a sheep.  Think about whether your brushes can already do what Terry’s can and think about whether your colours can already do what Terry’s can.  Otherwise you’re going to end up with too many brushes and too many colours.  As an experienced artist looking at the book, though, I find no shortage of ideas coming out of it: techniques, elements to include and a lot about unsaturated colours, whether it’s using a messy Liron Yankonsky palette or just using more burnt umber and burnt sienna.  And I can just flick through the book and be inspired by Terry’s paintings.

It’s a surprisingly good book.  All self contained and covering everything you could possibly want from a book on snow scenes.  Oh, apart from spattering on masking fluid for falling snow, which doesn’t get a mention, but for which we can forgive him.  You know what?  I’m going to surprise everyone and give this book four palettes.

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