I know I’m not alone —most of the people living on my continent were plunged into the deep freeze in the past couple weeks. While trying to keep warm, it would probably have been more uplifting to paint spring flowers, however, it seemed more fitting to the occasion to paint an ice picture.

Here’s a photo I took a few weeks ago after a night of rain and then freezing temperatures. The ice that formed in the ditch had very unique shapes and textures and I snapped a photo to capture it.

So last week, while contemplating painting snow or ice, I pulled up this photo and played around with cropping it in various places to see what design caught my eye. I intended to do some kind of abstract using the design chosen. Here is the portion I decided upon:

Upon closer inspection after blowing up the selected portion of the photo, I saw so many wonderful textures.

So instead of painting an abstract, I tried to capture as much of the texture as I could using watercolor paint. I used colors that made it look much colder than the photo does— more in keeping with the temperatures we experienced the past couple weeks!

I probably won’t hang this on the wall, as I’d much rather be reminded of warm times, but it was a fun study in texture painting!