It is 4pm and the light has already gone. I am at the kitchen window with a pen, hunting winter drawing ideas, and the garden is flat grey nothing.
Then something on the glass moves. Not the frost. My own breath, fogging and clearing.
Here is what winter actually does. It takes the colour away and leaves the shapes standing there.
A bare tree is a diagram of itself. Summer hides that under leaves. Winter hands it over.
So the season everybody calls empty is the easiest one to draw. Fewer things. Harder edges. More white.
Below: a free prompt card, then 53 subjects. The card comes first.
Download the free winter prompt card →
The card teaches one shape at the top and then gets out of the way. Underneath it is a grid.
Fill 1 square an evening. That is the entire system, and it is why the book fills up.
Set the print dialog to actual size. (It will want to shrink the page to fit. Do not let it.)
On a January evening the choosing is the hard part, so the card chooses for you.
Then the 53 subjects, in the order the house gives them to you. The window first, then the table, then the coat hook, then outside.
Every subject here has gone wrong in my hands at least once. That is where the tips came from.
Colour is what summer gives you instead of structure.
Winter gives the structure back. That is the whole trade, and it is a good one.
The card gives you one shape and a grid. It does not tell you what to put in the other squares.
The Collection
Where do the subjects come from once the 53 run out?
This is for the evening the window goes black at 4pm. ULTIMATE CHRISTMAS DOODLE COLLECTION. A reindeer, a snowman, a tree, one very smug gnome. Inside: Christmas characters broken into simple shapes, with their fill patterns printed beside them. (Tracing is for the evenings your hand is not speaking to you. Mine goes quiet around mid-December.) What you get: a stack of cards that look like they took a fortnight.
Back to the window. The first subject is already there, and it is doing something.
Everybody who painted the winter month painted somebody sitting by a fire
For centuries the year got painted as a run of jobs. One picture per month, the same jobs every time.
The winter pictures were indoor pictures. December is killing pigs and baking. January is feasting. February is sitting by the fire warming your hands. (Labours of the Months, the standard cycle.)
That is the belief, and it held for a long time. Winter was a thing you waited out with your boots off.
Nobody was going outside to look at it. There was nothing out there. Everyone agreed.
(I have some sympathy. I have also agreed with this, at 4pm, in a warm room, holding a pen I was not using.)
That is 100 winter shapes on one page. Not one of them needs colour to read.
One painter sent the whole village outside into the snow instead
In 1565 a wealthy man in Antwerp, Niclaes Jonghelinck, commissioned a set of paintings of the months. He paid for 6 panels, and 5 of them survive. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.)
The winter panel is Hunters in the Snow. Oil on wood, 117 by 162cm, and still hanging in Vienna.
Nobody in it is warming their hands. The hunters are coming home with almost nothing. The dogs are thin.
Down the hill, a whole village is out on the ice. The only fire in the picture is outdoors, and somebody has just set a chimney alight by accident.
So the winter month stopped being a man indoors and became a view. That is the hinge.
(It is also the only winter picture I know that you can hear. Dogs, skates, crows, one shouting neighbour.)
The snow turned out to be the paper, not the subject
Look at what he did with the white. He did not draw snow. He drew everything that was not snow.
Dark shapes on a pale ground. Trees, crows, dogs, hunters, all of them cut out against it.
Do this at home: draw the dark things and stop. Leave the snow as bare paper.
You will see it work immediately. The eye reads untouched white as cold and deep.
If it looks wrong, you have drawn the snow. Shading inside a drift turns it grey, and grey reads as dirt.
I once spent a whole evening hatching a snowy field. It came out looking like a car park.
Draw the dark things. The white is already doing its job.
Why winter drawing ideas are easier than the summer ones
Three reasons, and none of them is about talent.
The first is edges. A frozen puddle has an edge you can point at. A meadow does not.
The second is the count. Winter empties the garden down to 8 or 9 objects. You can draw them all.
The third is the light. It comes in sideways and puts a long shadow next to everything.
(Also it is dark by 4pm, which is inconvenient for most activities and perfect for this one.)
So the winter drawing ideas that work lean on shape, not colour. A pen does shape. That is all a pen does.
One pinecone, drawn 3 ways. Same object, 3 moods, and the scales go in last every time.
A printmaker lost 188 sketchbooks and went straight back out for 102 days
Kawase Hasui, born 1883, made his name on snow. He sketched outdoors, on the spot, then finished the designs back in his lodgings.
In 1923 an earthquake took his publisher’s workshop and the blocks with it. He also lost 188 sketchbooks of landscapes. (Kawase Hasui.)
What he did next is the part worth keeping. He went travelling with a sketchbook for 102 days. It was the longest trip of his life.
He came home with the next decade of work in his bag. He designed around 620 prints, and in 1956 he was named a Living National Treasure.
Now the technical bit, because it changes how you look at his snow. In a woodblock print the white is the paper. Nobody prints it.
The snow is the part left alone. And his 1953 print Snow at Zōjō-ji still took 42 separate printings to build everything around that white.
The blank part was free. Everything else took 42 passes.
(I think about that most winters, usually while overworking something that was finished 20 minutes ago.)
A winter in one cabin made the drawing lighter, not harder
Rockwell Kent took his 8-year-old son to Fox Island in Alaska and stayed 7 months, August 1918 to March 1919. He drew the whole time. The journal became Wilderness, published in 1920. (Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
One line in it is the most useful sentence about winter I have read. “I painted with some success for the snow makes the cabin lighter.” (the journal, in full.)
Snow outside means more light inside. It bounces off the ground and comes up through the window.
Test it tomorrow. Sit where you always sit and look at the underside of your own hand.
So the darkest part of the year has the brightest working surface in it. Take the table by the window, not the lamp in the corner.
(I moved my chair 3 feet after reading that sentence and have never moved it back.)
The snow makes the cabin lighter. It also makes the paper whiter than the drawing.
The 53 winter drawing ideas, starting at the window
Here they are, in the order the house hands them over. All of them go in ink, in under 20 minutes, from a chair.
At the glass first. A frost fern, which grows sideways from the edge of the pane, so start at the edge and never in the middle. A single snowflake, and the rule is 6 arms, never 8, because 8 reads as a star. A condensation drip, which is a fat comma with a wet trail behind it.
Then the trees, which are the best thing about the season. A bare birch, thin and pale, drawn from the top down so the twigs get finer. A bare oak, which is all elbows, and the trick is that every branch turns at least twice. A hedge under snow, one long soft shape with 3 or 4 dark holes punched in it.
Then whatever is sitting in them. A robin, which is mostly a ball with a beak stuck on the front. A blackbird on snow, pure silhouette, no interior lines at all. A wood pigeon, twice the robin’s size and half its personality. Draw the chest and let it look smug.
(I have drawn that robin more often than any other object in this house, including my own hand.)
And the last of the window set, all of them structures. A fence post with a cap of snow, where the snow must overhang the edges or it looks painted on. Telephone wires with snow along the top, which want one confident sag and nothing else. Tyre tracks in slush, 2 ribbons of tone with white gaps left where the tread lifted.
That is 12 subjects, and they all sit inside 3 feet of one pane of glass.
The winter drawing ideas that live on the table and on the coat hook
Move to the table. A mug of cocoa with steam. The steam is the hard part, so draw 2 loose lines and stop. A teapot, which is 1 fat shape plus a spout that almost everybody draws too low. A lemon half, all radiating segments, worth doing badly 10 times.
Then the good winter smells, which happen to be good shapes. A clementine with the peel coming off in one piece. Cinnamon sticks, which are rolled tubes, so the end is a spiral and the side is 3 straight lines. A star anise, which is 8 little boats in a ring.
(I keep 3 star anise in the drawer. Two are for drawing. The third is a sort of insurance.)
Then the evening props. A jar of preserves with the light coming through it. A candle stub, and draw it after it has burned, when the rim has gone uneven and interesting. A bowl of nuts with the cracker lying across it.
And the greenery the house fills up with. A pinecone, drawn from the bottom up so the scales overlap correctly. A fir sprig, which is 1 stem and 40 short strokes at the same angle. A holly sprig, where the spikes want to be even and must not be. A bulb in a glass, roots and all, and the roots are the whole reason to draw it.
That is 25 so far. Now the coat hook, which is the most honest still life in the house.
A knitted mitten, thumb out, drawn as a flat shape before any stitches go on. A cable-knit cuff, where the cable is a plait, and a plait is only 2 lines crossing. Wool socks drying on a rail, one slumped, never a matching pair.
Then the rest of what winter makes you wear. A scarf on a hook, which is a long S with the weight at the bottom. A bobble hat, which is a dome and a cloud. Boots by the door, and the good version is 1 upright and 1 fallen over.
Then the damp outer layer. A folded wet umbrella, a tight bundle of triangles. A coat on a peg, all shoulder and no body. Gloves, one of them lost, which is the truest drawing on this page. A hot water bottle in its cover, a rounded rectangle with a ribbed neck and a lot of dignity.
That takes it to 35.
Outside, where the winter drawing ideas get their edges
Coat on. These want 15 minutes and cold fingers, or a photograph and a warm chair. Nobody is checking.
The garden furniture first, because snow makes it comic. A garden chair under snow, which is a chair wearing a cushion it did not ask for. A bird table with a white roof and a queue. A wheelbarrow holding a smooth white load, tipped slightly.
Then the hard edges, which is why we came out. A stone wall with a snow line along the top, and the line must wobble with the stones. A frozen puddle, cracked, drawn as 3 or 4 long splits and nothing fussy. Icicles on a gutter, which need to vary in length or they read as teeth.
(I have gone out for 15 minutes and come home with 1 gatepost. It still counts.)
Then the things people made and left behind. A melting snowman, lopsided, which is far more interesting than a fresh one. Footprints crossing each other, where the depth comes from one dark edge per print. A sledge leaning on a wall. A bare rose stem with hips still on it, the last red thing in the garden.
That is 45.
The animals, the low sun, and the last of the 53
The final 8 are the ones you cannot arrange, which is exactly why they are worth having.
A fox crossing the lane, low and long, and the tail is half the animal. A deer at the treeline, drawn as legs and neck with the body barely there. A hare, which is ears, haunches and no time to waste.
Then the domestic ones, who are having a better winter than anybody. A cat on a radiator, which is a liquid poured into a shelf. A dog shaking off snow, drawn as a blur of 3 overlapping heads. That sounds ridiculous and it works.
And the sky, last, because it is free. A rook in a bare tree, 1 dark comma in a mess of twigs. The low sun through branches, drawn by leaving a white disc and letting the twigs cross it. The moon at 4pm, which is the strangest thing here. It is up there while the shops are still open.
That is 53. Count them if you like. I did, twice, and the second time I found the moon.
10 minutes, 1 pen, 1 window. That is the whole recipe on the evenings when 20 is too many.
The 53 will fill a winter. They will not fill a wall, and by February that is usually what you start wanting.
Christmas characters, each one broken down into shapes and fills
Start with the gingerbread man, then the reindeer. Inside: every character with its own step guide, for the nights the window goes black at 4pm.
Open the Christmas Doodle Collection →
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Put the pen down while the fox is still half a tail. Winter is not going anywhere before March, and neither is the fox.
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Fills are for the white spaces a bare shape leaves behind. Which is most of what winter hands you.
Winter takes the colour away, hands back the shapes, and then turns the lights down early so you have nowhere else to be. An hour at the window is not an hour lost, whatever the clock has to say about it.
Mirabelle wrote this. No training, strong opinions, many pens. Peer reviewed by a cat who took the warm chair the moment I stood up.
