Snow Tops, after Arkhip Kuindzhi

Oil on canvas, 7″ x 5″

I made this copy of another painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi from memory. It’s probably been a couple of months since the last time I looked at it and I wasn’t looking at it while painting, so the details are a little different.

I think this small canvas was originally a practice painting that I was making with a palette knife, but it wasn’t very well thought out, so after it dried I covered everything with blue in preparation for a different idea that I didn’t end up trying. Today I decided to just try painting something, and I remembered that I’ve wanted to copy this painting for a long time now.

The paints I used were mostly French ultramarine blue, terre verte, titanium white, and a little cadmium yellow pale. Also there’s a tiny amount of phthalo green and terracotta mixed in for the darker colors in the lower left corner. For the river I actually just wiped away the ultramarine and terre verte mix that I had covered that area with so the blue ground would show through.