Skiing Snowboard Paintings for sale by commission

Take a look at the painting process for the skiing snowboard paintings for sale by commission to personalise your skiing snowboard painting to include yourself in your favourite scene.

Last winter I had the most fabulous time painting a ski painting commission, a lot of fun because it was a real challenge. I got an email from an Irish man working in Japan who wanted a ski painting for a present for his wife who was still back in Ireland. The painting was on the glacier above Val d’Isere, a stunning place on top of the word. I have thousands of photos I use as reference for ski paintings of runs in a lot of the top European Ski resorts, especially the highest runs. But this one eluded me. Of the 1000 photos I had of Tignes and Val d’Isere, one of my top favourite ski areas, I could not find anything on this run.

I asked the client if he had any images of the runs on the Glacier. No luck so I had to piece it together from memory. I had skied the glacier many times in December and the weather had not been so kind with mostly blizzards and low cloud. I could remember the runs down in the gullies and the off piste pipes under the chair and a picture slowly emerged in my mind. Several days later I had a more or less full recollectionn of the scene and managed to pin down the area where the painting was to be. It was low down on one of the runs where the client had proposed to his wife many years ago, but no photos of this event existed . Many emails were exchanged and I built up a picture of the time of day the weather and where they were on the run. If you have skied this run, then you know it is quite a featureless area and with a dump of fresh powder the night before there was not much in the scene that I could work with. I need people, strong landmarks and contrast to make scenes work well. This was devoid of everything I use to make an interesting ski painting. The texture and colours hidden in the snow were going to be the making of the painting and expansiveness of the scene relative to the people.

The final email before I started painting was an amusing mock up photo of the male client proposing to his male work colleague so I could get the positioning of him and his wife right. A few photos of him and his wife in their ski gear at that time were the final clues I needed before I started.

This was such a tricky painting that I did not ask for a deposit as I wasn’t sure if it would work and I didn’t want the pressure of having a commitment to get it right so the deal was – if you like it you can buy it and if not no problem. It turned out to be so much fun to do as the client was very helpful in advising alterations to get the scene just as he remembered it.

The last job I had to do was to check what his wife’s favourite colours were to make sure she would at least like the colour scheme. Baby blue and baby pink were the colours so this would serve as part of the underlay of the painting with the white snow on top.