Gagnon Studio Online Painting Lessons

Lesson 1: A Guide to Simple Clouds

Welcome to the introductory lesson on painting clouds. This guide will explain how to paint very simple, but effective clouds. You will need a small canvas and the following colors:

Cobalt Blue Cerulean Blue Raw Umber White

You will need the following brushes:

2” Background Blender or 1” Landscape Brush

#8, 9 or 10 Round

Start out with a small primed canvas. The canvas in this guide is 11” X 14”

Make a mixture of half Cobalt Blue and half Cerulean Blue. Do not thin with water, use the color directly from the tube. Load your background brush with your blue mixture.

With your brush loaded with paint, begin making criss cross strokes across the top 1/3 of the canvas.

Make sure to blend your brush strokes by making X’s or criss crossing strokes. This will hide the brush strokes and make a consistent block of color.

Using the same brush, add some liquid white to your already mixed cobalt blue and cerulean blue. You want the shade of blue to be half as light as the top 1/3 of your canvas.

Add a strip of light blue along the bottom of your dark blue. Make a few broad criss cross strokes.

Once you have made a strip of light blue all the way across, start working your way up by making some small angled brush strokes to mix the dark blue and light blue together. This will bring some of the dark blue down into your light blue.

Work your way up halfway through the dark blue. Do not go all the way to the top yet. In this part of the blending process you want to blend the line where the light blue meets the dark blue.

Start broadening out your brush strokes and blend up and down.

Once you’ve blended the two blues together in the middle, start at the bottom of the light blue and make long horizontal brush strokes and work your way up. You want the brush strokes to go from one end of the canvas to the other.

Work your way up to the top with the long horizontal brush strokes.

With a new clean dry brush, make a long horizontal swath of plain liquid white.

You’re going to want to work it all the way down to the bottom of the canvas, and then start working your way back up.

Continue to work the white up to the bottom of the blue. Start making slightly angled brush strokes to bring some of the blue into the white.

Make sure you make criss cross brush strokes to mix the paint evenly. But the angles shouldn’t be too steep. You just want to blend out the line where the two colors meet.

Since skies get lighter as they get closer to the horizon, you want to leave a small swath of white at the bottom.

Start blending the paint with long horizontal brush strokes. Move up and down until it is evenly blended.

You now have a blended sky. Let this dry. If you have faint horizontal lines in the paint, that is okay. They should fade out as the paint dries.

Take your round brush, and mix one very small part of raw umber, with a very small amount of cerulean blue. Add in white paint to this mixture until you get a nice bluish gray color. Wipe off most of the paint from your brush. You don’t need much paint for this part of the cloud.

With continuous brush strokes. Paint out the bottom of the cloud. You don’t want to add too much paint to the canvas. We are going to be blending this with white, and want white to be the dominant color in the cloud. This purplish gray color will show through the white, creating shadows at the bottom of the cloud.

Continue across the canvas until you are happy with what the bottom of the cloud looks like. Remember that clouds are free flowing. They are rarely “round.” They are flatter as they get further away, but are more organic as they get closer.

Do not clean off your brush. Just add some white to the brush. Start in the middle of the cloud. With small circular brush strokes move up and down and begin to shape your cloud. At the same time you will begin blending the purplish shadow with the white.

Blend the cloud evenly, and make sure to leave a shadow at the bottom. Make sure to remember not to make sharp edges anywhere. You want to keep your clouds soft.

Continue making soft rounded contours on the top of the cloud. The cloud will be lighter as you move up, so you want to continue adding white to your brush. You will start with a clean brush later. By leaving some of the gray on the brush it makes blending easier and smoother.

Add highlights to the tops of all of the gray you painted on your canvas. Blend down, but remember to leave gray at the bottom for a shadow.

At this point your cloud has begun to take shape.

Start adding contours to the top of your cloud. Figure out where your light source is coming from and make sure to keep the brightest white on the side of the light source. In this case the light is traveling from left to right.

With circular brush strokes, blend the white up and down until it is evenly distributed across the middle of the cloud.

We are going to allow this layer of the cloud to dry. Go back to your mixture of raw umber, cerulean blue, and white. Add very little to the brush and then wipe the brush off. Make another smaller cloud below the first. This time the bottom of the cloud will be more flat because it is a little further away.

Add a little white to your gray mixture, and lightly add a highlight to the top of the small cloud.

The smaller cloud doesn’t have to be as defined or detailed, because it is further away. Your eye will naturally mix the color of the smaller cloud, making it look more realistic, without having as much detail.

Go back to your plain white paint. This time we’ll add a little more to the brush. Start on the edges of the cloud that are closest to the light source.

Begin adding rounded highlights to the big cloud. Make some nice bright white marks. You will blend them down in the next few steps.

Take your brush and blend the edges of your white marks. You want the outer edge of the cloud to look soft and you want to blend the white down through the middle of the cloud as well.

Continue blending the white down through the cloud, but leave a shadow at the bottom.

Make sure each part of the cloud has white highlights facing the light source.

Your cloud is now taking shape. We will continue to add layers of white until the cloud is bright and fluffy.

Go back to your dark mix of gray. Very lightly add a very small amount of paint. Then wipe it off. You want to just stain the ends of the brush. You don’t want a large amount of paint on it.

Gently make some horizontal lines near the bottom. This will give the impression of very distant clouds.

Go back to your plain white paint. Add some to your brush and make some rounded brush strokes in the middle of the cloud. This will create some more contours to the cloud.

Continue this process across the cloud. We will blend these out in the next steps.

Begin blending away from the light source. In this case I am blending from left to right, because that is the way the light source is traveling.

A few more layers and our simple clouds will be complete. Notice how I leave shadows when blending. This will be explained further in the video.

Your paint is probably still a little wet. Just take your brush and blend the middle of the cloud to make it brighter. Make sure to leave areas of dark to show through as shadows.

Blend all the way across from left to right.

Make sure to highlight the small clouds that are breaking off from your big cloud as well. Then blend them down from left to right..

You can add wispy clouds at the end of your larger cloud. This gives the impression that the cloud is traveling through the sky and breaking apart.

As the cloud breaks apart it becomes less defined, so don’t worry about making any sharp edges on the wispy parts of your cloud.

You can add more highlights to your smaller cloud. Just remember, to make sure it has very soft edges at the top.

Make sure to blend evenly across the smaller cloud as well.

We are now adding another layer. This time we are going back to the plain white and adding some details. Make contours in the cloud with rounded brush strokes. We are only going to blend these ones down.

Blend down and evenly through the cloud. Be sure to leave areas of light and dark to create shadows.

Add highlights on your wispy clouds, but don’t make them quite as bright as your main cloud. The wispy clouds are more see through because they are breaking apart and dispersing through the sky.

Continue adding details where you feel is necessary.

Take your brush and wipe it off with a dry towel. Then do some scumbling of the clouds top edges. Scumbling is when you take a brush and scrub around edges to make them softer and less defined. Doing this to the cloud will make it have more movement.

Let the clouds dry completely. After they have dried, observe them and see if you want to add some more details.

In this case I wanted to brighten the cloud a bit more.

Make sure when adding final details, to blend evenly across the cloud.

You can also add more highlights to the smaller cloud. This may give the appearance that the cloud is closer. It all depends on how you want the cloud to be perceived.

Your clouds are complete. One thing to remember is, it is easy to overwork your clouds. It might be a good idea to let each layer dry, and then evaluate if you want to continue to add layers.