Learn How to Paint a Sweet Watercolor Snowman With Simple Steps

watercolor snowman painting

Winter and snowmen go hand-in-hand, so they make the perfect winter scene to paint! Grab your supplies and get ready to paint Frosty.

Watercolor Snowman

Level: Easy

What You Need

  • Watercolor paper
  • Watercolor paints
  • Pencil
  • Eraser
  • White gouache paint
  • Masking fluid
  • Instructions

    1. Create Your Composition

    watercolor snowman sketch

    Sketch your winter scene. The snowman is our focus, though it might not be for your picture, and we added a little snow-covered tree off to the side.

    To create falling snowflakes, we added dots of masking fluid. This will keep the flakes nice and white after painting.

    Pro Tip: A little trick for making snowflakes look more realistic is to make them different sizes to create background and foreground in the scene — and don’t make them all evenly white. The flakes further away always blend a little into the background. Try it! It will make the painting more interesting for you to work on, and make it more interesting to look at when you are done.

    2. Add a Blue Wash

    snowman painting blue wash

    This is, of course, subject to the mood you want to create. Using a wash of your favorite blues will have a mild monochromatic effect and will simplify your work compared to painting each part and parcel separately. For a lot of your work after a wash is complete, simply finish by adding some shading in areas of your composition. This saves time for the areas that need more consideration.

    No matter how you choose to execute your work, the desired result will be that you create pleasing art. There are many ways to get there. You can see we saturated our wash in varying amounts to differentiate the sky from the snow-covered land and also while the surface was wet, we were able to lay a base of the shadowing.

    3. Paint the Snowman

    painting watercolor snowman

    Begin adding shadows to the recesses of your snowman to make it 3D. You want the rest of the snowman to have the light blue wash and no more — your shading will enhance the white snow.

    watercolor snowman painting

    Then paint the carrot nose, mittens, hat and whatever other accessories your snowman has. Remove the masking fluid, touch up a few flakes with white gouache, and you’re done!

    Looking to get started with watercolors? Check out the class Startup Library: Watercolors below!

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