How to Paint Clouds in Watercolor - step-by-step

If you can paint a good sky, it really takes your work to another level. It sets the mood for your landscape scene, for your street scene. There's something really awe-inspiring about these big arrangements of towering clouds that are just gliding past each other and they're changing every minute. I just love this subject and it's something very exciting to paint in watercolor. And that's what we're going to work on today. I'm going to show you step-by-step how I paint these clouds. Now I don't want a lot of hard pencil lines in the sky, so I'm just lightly giving myself an idea. If I don't have any plan for these clouds, they all just kind of look like and fall apart. But I want to have a main cloud here and then the rest of them can kind of be more random. And what I want to do first is wet down the front and the back of my paper like I normally do. I'm going to get the whole back of my paper evenly wet. Now I'm going to evenly wet the front of the paper. It's a warm day here, so it's kind of warm in my house. I'm going to try to get this pretty wet because I want to have some time to work on the sky. Okay, large mop brush. What we're going to paint first is the light areas of the sky. I like to put a little bit of warmth in the clouds, so I'm going to get some raw sienna, a little bit of rosemary permanent, and a touch of ultramarine blue. So that looks good to me. A little bit of warm gray there. Now this is the color of the clouds. And you can just place these loosely. I always talk about this when painting skies. I'm not going to be able to paint exactly how it is here in my reference photo. It's so many complexities, just so much detail. I'm trying to create an impression of these clouds. Just getting the feel for the clouds, not trying to copy them literally. Okay, now I'm going to add some lavender into my mix. Let's use some lavender and a little bit of raw sienna, a little bit of rosemary permanent. And this is a little, just a little darker, a little more value than what I just had. And what we're doing now is creating some nice wet into wet differences. Subtle little differences, soft little changes in value. And we're just doing this layer by layer. Remember, as we get near the horizon line, there's more clouds, so we want more little marks, more little differences. So we've really just established the lights of our clouds, the light values. A little stronger again. This time I'm using a little bit of neutral tint, lavender. Now this your brush to create some variety. Okay, a little more strength. I'm going to put a little bit of cerulean into this, cool it off just a little bit. Now we're going to get into the blue of the sky, the rich strength of that blue. So I want a rich mixture of cerulean, ultramarine blue. Let's do a little bit of lavender as well. And let's get to some of this blue and define our main cloud here. It's pretty damp still, so some of that's going to bleed into this cloud and that's okay. We're just going to work with this the best that we can and you go with it. All right, getting that rich blue in really makes a difference. I'm going to minimize this part of the cloud and this is going to be our main focus. Then as we get in here, we want to use a little more cerulean. I'm going to wash a little bit of that off my brush and use a little more water and a little more cerulean. Okay, a little more water, same thing, lighten up a little bit and we're going to think about the bottom of the sky here. I'm trying to keep my marks random, not paint too much of a pattern. And then we get all the way to the horizon line, spring that blue all the way down. One thing I want to do is just put a couple darks, a couple more darks. The undersides of these clouds need a little more strength. Lavender, maybe some cerulean, some neutral tint, taking some of the moisture off my brush. I don't want to go in with super wet mixture. Don't want to overdo it. You have to proceed with caution for sure. Things are starting to dry up on the paper, so that means I need to be done soon. I think that's looking pretty good. A few little marks to break up areas that seem repetitive or boring. Okay, I'm going to take a step back. I think that's pretty good. Have you ever been really excited about a painting and you get all set up, you find that right reference that you're excited about, and then it's time to go and you feel lost? Have you ever had that experience? You just are having a hard time finding consistency. Some of your paintings turn out, some of your paintings don't turn out, and you're not really sure why. Well, I have a free resource that I want to give to that can help exactly with these problems. My five steps to plan a successful watercolor painting. I walk you through the crucial planning phase of your painting that will help you understand what you're going to paint first, second, and third. The planning is really so important, especially in watercolor. This medium is harder to correct. It's so immediate, so having that plan is very important. I send you a PDF that you can download, and the great thing about this is you can have it on your phone, you can print it out, and you can take a look at these crucial planning steps before you start each painting to ensure that you're thinking through these important things as you get started. You can download this right now before you start your next painting. All you have to do is follow this link here and download my five-step guide to planning a successful watercolor painting.