Warm Winter Light came from an area just west of my home in Northern Colorado, near where the foothills begin to rise into the Front Range. I found this scene late one winter evening while traveling west toward the Big Thompson Canyon. The sun was getting low, and the last light of the day was warming the tan and orange cliffs beyond the valley.

What interested me was the contrast between that warm light and everything surrounding it. The sky was a subdued gray-blue, the snow-covered foreground was cool, and the bushes and trees in the middle ground had soft, quiet edges. Against those cooler colors, the warm cliffs became the natural focus of the painting without needing to exaggerate them.

In this three-part series, I’ll show you how I used those relationships of warm and cool color, value, and soft edges to build the painting and capture that brief winter light.

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