How To Paint A Cloud

I'm going to show you how to paint a cloud. I've started off by painting my piece of paper with some blue oil paint thinned down with some ultramarine blue, a little bit of white, and that gave me a base for putting on some of my whites. I'm going to take some titanium white paint, a little bit of linseed oil and I'm just going to start to paint, just using a photograph for reference, the white areas that I can see.

I'm putting it on fairly thickly. The blue from behind just helps take the whiteness out of the paint. If you look really hard in the sky, you'll notice that the clouds are very rarely pure white with lots of different tones.

Sometimes, you see a bit of crimson, sometimes a little bit of lemon yellow, and sometimes a bit of gray. The paint is gray over the black in your colour. Always look really hard to see what you can really see.

So, I painted out my cloud shape. The next thing I want to do is start putting some of the tones. Now, with a little bit of shadow underneath, maybe using a little bit of black with a little bit of crimson and a little bit of a red tint, I can just start to just work in the paper.

The more I work it in, the more it blends in and this instantly starts to disappear. Imagine light is coming from the sun above and creating a shadow underneath. The more paint I put on, the darker, and there'll be little shadows around where the bits are all over.

So, I can get darker, maybe a little bit ultramarine, we'll put active paints and colours in, pooling underneath there, and I consider lighter as well, so I can start putting some white on at the top, a thick white just where I might see the light really hitting or even maybe through a tiny bit of lemon yellow as well, a nice fresh yellow colour. Now the background, I'm just going to have now the blue skies. So, I'm just going to work the background in, taking some cerilium blue, a little bit of ultramarine as well and a little bit of white to lighten it.

I can just build up the background colour there and that just helps to sort of form the outside shape of the cloud. Make sure it's not too neat. If it's too neat, it will look too planned.

Give it a little bit random and maybe some of that sky killers just reflecting on the cloud there. Usually, underneath the clouds, you have layers and layers of other clouds so we can suggest to smother other clouds going into the distance, each one with a little bit of shadow underneath, so this is like that. Now, what you could do at this point is clean up the brush and just start working some of the colours in.

We don't want it to be like an impressionistic cloud, maybe like to try and just blend the colours in. Think about what colour you're dragging into which part. It's going to control where the dark goes and where the light goes.

I'm just working it in. I'm just going to finish off with some larger white just to catch the light with a little bit of life. Obviously, there are different types of clouds.

Each one needs to be studied, go outside, have a look, take some photographs, just a general way of getting started if you want to have a go. Finally, I'm just going to square off the area here. So, that's one way that you might like to have a go at painting a cloud. .