How To Paint Clouds [In Watercolor]

I think this is maybe the most fun part about painting the sky is adding these dark blues in. Hey everyone! Today I'm going to show you how I like to paint clouds. I'm going to take a sponge and I am going to wet down both sides of the paper. If one side is wet, the paper tends to curl up. And if you wet both sides down, then the paper tends to lay flat. Because both sides are wet, it gives me more time to work and get soft edges. The only hard edge you might have is that one cloud that's kind of lit up more than the other clouds. I'm going to take some raw sienna and some lavender and I want a pretty faint wash. And what I'm doing here is just taking away the white of the paper. So I can cover everything and I might just leave a little area around where I want that main cloud to be. That lit up cloud. That brightest cloud there. So everything else I can go over. And I don't have to cover every single inch of the paper. Just bring it all the way down like that. So I have this lighter, kind of warmer tone to the paper. And as I move forward, I'm going to darken up this wash a little bit. And I'm going to introduce some Payne's gray along with my lavender. I'm not going really dark yet. Maybe a little raw sienna in that. Just a little stronger and a little darker than that last wash. I'm slowly building up the darker areas of these clouds. And I want to leave little bits behind of the wash I just laid down and just add some variation to these clouds. Now I'm looking at this reference photo and I'm trying to get a general feel for the sky. But if I go in there and try to copy every little bit of these clouds, it's never going to work. Everything would dry up by the time I did half of this. So just move your brush around. Try to get some natural kind of brush marks. Avoid repetition. Avoid patterns. Make random shapes. One thing you'll notice as you get closer to the horizon line, you're seeing more of these horizontal darker areas of the clouds. So as you move down, your shapes are closer together. And I want to try to work some of that in to show a sense of depth. And I'm not too worried about down here. That would be where I would put some ground underneath the clouds if that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go once again over here to my palette and I'm going to mix a darker mix of those three colors. So we started out really light. We got a little bit darker. And now we're getting even darker. Stronger. Okay, so there is a darker cloud kind of at the top here. Some of the bottoms of these clouds are a little darker. Kind of the same thing over here. It's a darker cloud kind of right here. Again, I'm not trying to copy my reference exactly. I'm trying to suggest all of these clouds. I'm going to add some cerulean and maybe some cobalt here. And I haven't really introduced any of that blue sky yet. So that's going to be what I want to do next. And I'm going to get a generous amount of cobalt blue, cerulean blue, some lavender. And I need this to be pretty thick. Okay, before I go in there, it's still pretty wet. The paper is still pretty wet. And I'm going to take this paper towel and press down just a little bit. And I'm defining, I'm kind of deciding where I want my hard edge of that cloud to be. And I could have been a little more careful and not wet that area of the paper so much. But that's another way to do it, is to kind of dry the paper around that area before you go in. Okay, so I'm looking where the these dark rich blue colors are up in the sky. And let's see. It's still pretty wet. It's kind of blending together. And I like that. Okay, I can tell that it's not quite dark enough. More cobalt blue, more cerulean. That's probably better. I think this is maybe the fun part about painting the sky, is adding these dark blues in. You've got to be really careful when you do that, because it's so tempting to keep chipping away to get the shape of that just right. And before you know it, you've taken away your white cloud, and it's a tiny little sliver. I've done that a lot of times. So be mindful of that when you go in with this blue. So part of learning to paint in watercolor is getting used to your timing and practicing and understanding how wet your paper is, and how much paint and water you have on your brush. I'm going to start with some small areas down here. We could use just a few little darks. Darkening up the bottom of that really helps round out the clouds. Makes it look a little more believable. I don't want to overdo this. Again, like everything else, it's so easy to overdo. Just a few of these darks, it kind of breaks up that that large, large gray shape where everything's kind of the same. Soften that with my finger there. I'm going to move on down. So that's my sky demo. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you get something out of that. If you like this little tutorial and you'd like to see more, check out my Patreon page. I release a full-length tutorial every single month. I'd love to see you there. So check that out, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.