How to Create a Winter Background!

In this lesson, you can create a cool winter background or winter painting on your own! As well, you will learn how to paint snow using various different digital brushes!

You will switch between smooth round brushes, small line brushes, and, in some cases, splatter type brushes for minor details.

As for color, you will primarily use shades of very light color that are close to white.

This is because you want to not only capture the color of the elements that the snow is covering, but the snow itself (since light reflects off snow easily to give it that pure white color).

Let's start the lesson on creating a winter background!

1. Background for your winter painting

Unless you have some sort of a warm light source, your winter background should consist mostly of cool blues.

What I recommend painting is a nice cool blue sky followed by a lighter hue of blues on the ground. This will set a nice range of colors for you to sample from.

With your digital brushes, start painting in some clouds to form your environment. In some cases, you want to reduce the number of clouds in the atmosphere to emphasize the cold environment.

Other than that, don't worry too much about the setup as you can always go back to it since the backgrounds should be on separate layers anyway!

2. Snow covered objects

In this step of creating a winter background painting, I aimed to have three different types of textures: mountains, trees, and round rock.

Just follow a long and create simple darkened shapes of these elements. This way, we want to have a base for the snow to cover!

Use a large chalk brush for the mountains, splatter brushes for the trees, and a simple round brush for the rocks.

Be creative with the shapes. You may want to switch between different brushes to get the desired effect. Regardless, do not paint too many details in these shapes.

This is because we are going to let the snow paint the remaining textures for us.

3. Learn how to paint snow

As mentioned, the textures will differ depending on the object you are going to paint over. For the rocks, you will need to paint smooth snow covering each rock.

Since smooth rock is round, you will paint mostly the top half of the rock with snow as the rest of the snow will not reach the bottom parts. Make sure not to forget the rock shadows.

For the trees, you want to switch to a splatter type brush. Angle the snow downwards as the weight of the snow will weigh down any branches.

The splatter technique will create individual foliage coming out from the main trunk. Switch to darker shades of white as you near the other side of the tree to show your light source.

The final piece is the mountains. Here, you will need to simulate horizontal rock layers that have created the mountain. With a small brush, begin to paint layer sections one after another near the peak.

After that, use larger brush sizes and merge the peaks to the bottom sections of the mountain. Eventually, you want to make it blend in with the white horizon. Paint additional peaks to give more volume to your mountains.

Never forget where your light source is coming from!

4. Finishing touches

If your colors don't look correct, you can always adjust it to your liking. Use the sharpen tool to bring out additional details if necessary.

In this example, what I focused on the most is adjusting and emphasizing where my light source is located.

To make it a little more dynamic, I've added a few snowflakes. This can be done simply by using a large smooth round brush and randomly dot the area on a separate layer.

Place your pressure sensitivity options to sizing so you can create different sized snowflakes with your pen pressure.

How you continue painting snow in your own example is up to you. Just remember to create mass where it's necessary and to think of how snow will behave in the real world as it falls from the sky.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson on how to paint a winter background! Have fun and keep practicing painting snow in your digital art program!

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