Travel watercolor to Alaska

In the recent spring break, I travelled to Alaska with my friends in BIZ. The sceneries were great, lots of snow mountains, glaciers and trees. This is also my first time trying to draw travel watercolor. I used Winsor&Newton travel watercolor set with traveling brushes

Paint set

Since the landscape in Alaska always have snow, so the primary color will be different intensity of blue. Mix Prussian blue with yellow ocre, magenta and green will give the unsaturated gray. On top of this, ass more blue or red or yellow to create different hues of gray. To create lighter tone, I only need to add water to it. It is a cool trick taught by art professor George Kozmon that to exclude black from the pallet. This way I am limited to only mix color to create dark tone instead of using black directly. However, I think adding neutral tint in the pallet is useful.

Color pallet

Beginning with a general sketch indicating the general shapes and dark areas. I begin with the first wash to determine the atmosphere (with the inspiration from Joseph Zbukvic). Then I use darker shades of tones to paint shadows and foregrounds. Since the snow mountains are usually white in general, so the highlights can be left as blank. Then paint details or do some fix using a smaller brush.

Here are some of my paintings in Alaska.

I will post some watercolor painting blogs later.