How To Paint Clouds In Watercolor | Quick Expressive Skies

1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Julia. I'm an illustrator and field sketcher, and I love watching clouds and painting them. In this class, I will show you basic techniques for sketching clouds and skies in watercolor. We will take a look at how to paint simple but realistic clouds in watercolor, learn a bit about composition, and how to mix interesting colors for skies. I will demonstrate step-by-step how I paint different types of clouds and skies. Sketching the sky is also a vital part of capturing landscapes and it's relaxing and a lot of fun. Painting the sky and clouds are also great ways to get to know our watercolors better. This class is great for anyone who loves to look at the sky and the clouds, and who would like to paint them more effortlessly. The class is perfect for beginners and intermediate watercolorists, and anyone who wants to include more detailed clouds into their landscape sketches. You will only need basic watercolor materials, a small palette, a few brushes, and some paper. I hope you'll join me in this class to observe and sketch lots of skies and clouds scopes. Let's dive in. 2. Tools You Need: Let's go over the materials you will need. I will do all of my demonstrations with these three brushes. They are very similar to the brushes I also bring to my field sketching. These are synthetic brushes, rather inexpensive. I just make sure that the round brushes that I have form a really nice tip when they're wet. This is a Size 8, then I have a Size 4. As for the flat brush, this is around a Size 10 or a half-inch. As for the paints, I will simply use my small field palette for this. There are many colors in it, but you don't really need all of them to paint nice clouds. I would say you will get away with other greens without the black and probably with some of the others here. What I would say is do make sure that you have a balanced palette available to you, and that it has at least two blues. An ultramarine blue is really crucial. Then another lighter blue, maybe a cerulean blue. I also like to use cobalt blue a lot for skies. Sometimes I like to have additional blues in my palate like indanthrone blue or manganese blue. These are entirely optional. I would say the absolute minimum is really ultramarine, cobalt, and cerulean blue. The other part of your palate that's really going to be essential for painting clouds are the earth tones. I have a burnt sienna and raw sienna. Then I also have this here. This is a raw amber. You don't really need this one if you have burned and raw sienna. What can be nice to paint? Sunsets or sunrises are a few of these other colors. I like to have a cool and warm red, so this is more like a pink or quinacridone pink. Then I have this warmer red vermilion and two different yellows. Lemon yellow and a pure yellow. I also like to have an orange in my palette so that I don't have to mix too much of this. Also essential for cloud painting will be a white. I usually have this little pen off-white here that I can just reactivate with water. For the paper, for painting clouds where lots of water is involved, I think, it's really important that you use cotton watercolor paper. Make sure that it's at least 300 GSM or 140 pounds so that it isn't too flimsy. There's this thinner watercolor paper that will just warp when you add lots of water to it. Make sure that it is a bit sturdier than this. For this course, I would say use cold press paper. I also use it for the demonstrations. You can also use hot press paper. It's what I use in my sketchbooks, but it doesn't distribute the pigments as nicely, so it's a bit harder to control. Cold press paper has this light structure, whereas hot press paper is entirely smooth. Cold press paper is generally easier to handle and it gives these interesting effects for clouds. If you like granulating pigment, then you can get beautiful effects with them on cold press paper. I will be using mostly this paper here. This is Arches cold pressed and it has 100% cotton. Whatever paper you choose. There are other papers that are quite nice like this one, Winsor and Newton, professional watercolor, cold-pressed. Make sure that it says, where is it here? 100% cotton because if you use wood cellulose paper, then you will notice it doesn't absorb the water as readily and as smoothly into the surface. Then you will probably run into problems. The other materials that you will need are, of course, a water container of some kind, then a mixing area, a painting rag. I like to use these soft cloth rags and also have a paper towel around, which is sometimes can be nice for certain types of clouds to blot out paint and that's essentially it.[OVERLAPPING] want to try out. 3. Examples From My Sketchbook: Before we dive into mixing and painting, I'd like to give you an idea of how I approach painting clouds and also talk quickly about my paper and pigment choices. I mostly work in these sketchbooks and I like to paint quick and loose guys and very often my clouds sketches only have one or two layers. In my sketchbooks I still use cotton paper that takes a bit of water and these sketchbooks, I use hot press paper. Let's look at the difference. This is a piece of cold press paper maybe you can already see this. It has a slight bit of texture as opposed to the hot press paper. Cold press paper will always show more texture and it will also bring out the granulation and pigments more. I use hot press paper because I don't really like this in my field sketches, particularly for very delicate flowers so I prefer hot press paper. I'm going to show you the difference between these two. Here you have hot press paper with two different pigments. I'm going to talk about this in a minute. Here you have cold press paper. You can already see that you will get smoother washes with hot press paper and this is why I prefer this. It doesn't produce these dramatic granulation effects. You can also get beautiful skies out of this, as you can see here, and very smooth washes if you want. These are different ultramarine and I've chosen to use an ultramarine blue that is non granulating. This is called ultramarine finest or often ultramarine green shade. This is a pigment that's very finely milled, so it has almost no granulation. It's not as obvious for the hot pressed paper. As you can see, it produces less granulation than on the cold press paper. But if you look at these two, then you can see that the French ultramarine, which is just your standard ultramarine, that you get in every basic palette so to speak. It produces a lot more granulation, especially when you add lots of water. The ultramarine finest has really subdued granulation effect. I prefer this, you don't really have to choose between those or be as meticulous about it as I am. I also have a few other blues that granulate lightly like cobalt blue or cerulean blue and this is really an individual choice. If you enjoy this kind of granulation then absolutely go for it. Just pick French ultramarine or any other ultramarine, this will probably give you nice results on cold press paper. Let's finally take a look at a few of my recent sketches with clouds in them. Very often in my sketches, the clouds are really kept simple and I painted with one or two layers at the most. Sometimes when the sky is not the subject, I leave out clouds or sky entirely. This is one more. Generally, I like to paint loose and quick skies and clouds. These are done in two layers, one for the blue and then I let everything dry and add the cloud charts later. We will look in detail at how this is done. Here's another example for very quick fluffy clouds that I did in probably one-and-a-half layer probably. This is another example for a really nice quick sky with really basic brushstrokes, basic clouds and here's another page with examples for clouds and skies that are done with mostly one or two layers. Just this very quick approach. What I find most important for these sketches is not to overwork washers. I find you often get the best results when you go in with your paint and place a few decisive strokes, and then leave the paint alone until it's dry. I find that watercolor sky sketches are an area where less can be more. I try to keep my skies as simple as possible to avoid any overworking. Of course I will touch up an area sometimes if I dare. [LAUGHTER] But I try to get in and out with as few brush strokes as possible. That's my philosophy about this. Often means planning ahead a little bit, for example deciding where I want to leave white-space for the big fluffy clouds because these wide parts here, that's actually the paper white and I leave that free until I can go over these white areas with my shadow color here. Then sometimes you see a lot of overlapping clouds in the sky and it can make sense to add several layers so this was painted like this. I applied a wash with this blue and the orange part and then I waited until it dried and then I went over it again with this darker wash here. This is useful if you want to achieve really hard edges and make the cloud and the foreground stand out really. This was done in a similar way and often clouds have this combination of hard and soft edges and this is also something that we will take another look at. You can see this here slightly where we have clouds from the foreground floating into the background. The quickest way to sketch a skyscraper or a cloud scape is to sketch very small. I love these small landscapes sketches that to me they're more an idea than a finished sketch. Very often I just want to make a quick observation or record an emotion. For this, I often keep a separate page in my sketchbook. This is actually the first page in this particular sketch book. Sometimes I find, I add a few words are the dates around these small drawings and for me this is a great way to try new techniques, experiment with pigments and when a page is finished, I have a collection of these seasonal skies and cloud formations. It's pretty interesting too. Now that we've looked at different ways to sketch clouds and the sky, let's take a look at the different blues that we can use for that. 4. Choosing Blues And Painting the Sky: We've already talked about the different ultramarine varieties and why I choose this less granulating one for my palette. But there are more blue pigments out there and it's worth taking a look. Most palettes have different choices for blues in them, and this can be very useful to paint skies. Skies don't always have the same blue, and choosing a darker or a lighter blue depending on the color or type can be the first step. I personally always have ultramarine blue in my palette. We've already talked about the varieties of ultramarine in the last lesson. This is a beautiful, dark, warm, blue which you can mix very well. Two other blues that are also always in my palette are cobalt blue, which is a nice middle blue, and cerulean blue, which is a lovely, very light blue. With these three blues, you can get a nice range between dark and light skies. Very often the sky can look like it has a gradient with dark blues overhead and then it changes to a lighter blue towards the horizon. Often you can even see a slightly yellow band right at the horizon. Using different blues in this graded wash can look very nice and convincing. I would say, let's just try this out now. I'm going to do this with this ultramarine and the cerulean blue. What I want to do first is pick up a nice amount of paint and then lay it in. My paper is slightly angled, so the natural way for the water here is to move downwards. When I've applied this first wash, I will clean up my brush. Then with a clean brush with just a little amount of water, I will pick up the paint and move it down slightly. I'll just do this again, reintroduce a bit of the darker paint at the top so that it can slowly move down and do a nice even wash. I can introduce the second color. I will simply put it on my brush and continue with the second color. Then like with the ultramarine, I want to fade this out slightly so that I end with an almost clear wash at the bottom. As long as this is still really wet, you can definitely drop in more paint. You need to be a little bit careful because it can get streaky very easily, so don't add too much water to this. Also, blot away excess water at the bottom. There's what beam high graded wash. If you don't want to mix your colors, you can also do a wash with just one color. Let's use cobalt blue for this because we haven't really used it yet. Again, I would mix a big puddle of paint and then just apply a lot of it to the top. Then add a bit of water to your brush and just try and fade it out. This should be a bit easier than the first one because you don't have to think about introducing a second color. You can always add a bit more at the top as long as you make sure that it's quite even. These are two easy ways to get realistic-looking skies. These are also great ways to learn how to control watercolor. These are two ways to do basic graded washes. By practicing how to paint skies, you will also practice basic watercolor techniques. Another technique that I like to do for these graded washes in skies is to add yellow band at the horizon, like I talked about earlier. What I would do in this case is do a blue wash like I did before. I start at the top and then fade it out at the bottom and then I would let it dry and go over just the part at the bottom near the horizon with a very light layer of yellow or raw sienna. I'm going to use a flat brush this time to show you that it can also be very useful for this graded wash. Picking up just a little bit of cobalt and the slide cerulean blue. With a flat brush, you will get these nice clean brush strokes. My wash is dried. Now, we're just going to pick up a little bit of yellow. Just make sure it's really a thin wash. Then I will just start from the bottom, clean my brush, and work my way up till I come to the area where the two colors meet. You don't want to overlap them too much because otherwise the gradient can turn a bit green. It's very unlikely that you will see a green gradient like this if you're not watching the North Lights. Then you can let the second wash dry too. You'll have a beautiful graded wash with this nice gradient from blue to lighter blue to this nice shine at the horizon that indicates the sun. For a darker, more dramatic feeling sky, you could either use a dark blue if you have one like the Indian thrown blue, or you could simply mix a dark earth tone into your ultramarine blue. I will start with a generous amount of my ultramarine. Then what always works very nicely is to pick up small amount of burnt sienna and just mix this in. You can see this turns into a nice dark blue. If you add even more burnt sienna, then it will turn into gray and then into a brownish tone. But I think just as it is now, it's very nice. This is a nice dark dramatic sky. Stormy sky might look like this. Then maybe morph into something that has more gray in it. I've simply mixed a bit more of the burnt sienna into this. This to me looks like a really bad weather. You will see that when I go over this again, then the the pigments begin to be quite unsettled and it will get uneven. With these kinds of washes, it's really best to go in and do your stuff and then leave it all alone until it's dry because you can see that this doesn't really look like a nice gradient anymore. But this is another possibility to do a more darker, a more dramatic sky. 5. Mixing Sky And Cloud Colors: For painting stormy skies or clouds, you will need grays. For this, it's a good idea to know a few good mixing combinations. In this lesson, I'd like to further explore this. You will very often need gray when you want to paint the sky. You probably will have to mix that because usually palettes don't have a gray and even if they come with a pre-mixed gray, it's often quite dull and flat. Cloud colors can also range from blue over gray to almost purple or reddish colors. Of course, the sky itself comes and many shades of blue and can sometimes be gray or pink, or yellow. You will need to learn a bit about mixing. I would suggest to test out your paints to see if you can get nice sky colors from them. I do this in a sketchbook that I reserve for these mixing experiments. I just explore my paints like this and see what I can get out of them. What I always do is I take notes about the colors that I use, and sometimes about the amount of colors so that I can replicate what I found out. I would like to explore these mixing experiments in this lesson a little bit and hope that you can explore your colors a bit from there. Let's start with the all-time favorite of watercolor painters, ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. You already saw this mix in the graded wash in the last lesson. I'd just like to show you what a huge variety of colors you can get out of this particular combination. It will make for a nice neutral or for a slightly darker blue but you can also go into the other direction and get an almost brown color out of it. Of course, the more burnt sienna you will add, the more brown tones you will see. If you dilute this, then you can get really nice soft graze too. It's really nice to see these different colors. Of course, for clouds, you will want more organic-looking mixes. Let's take a look at what we can get out of all our cobalt blue here. Again, cobalt blue is slightly lighter than ultramarine. If you start mixing it with burnt sienna, you will get this really nice middle gray or middle stormy blue out of it. I really love that color, I have to say. It's a bit less dramatic than these darker mixes. Generally what you can say is that the darkness of your grays depend on the darkness of your blue and of the other color, the earth tone. If you choose a dark blue, then, you will likely get very dark gray mixes out of it. If you choose a lighter blue, like a cobalt blue and cerulean blue, then you will get lighter grays out of these mixes. That's also something to keep in mind. Of course, the more water you add, the lighter your gray will be too. I'm running out of space here, but I'd like to show you the third combination. We add burnt sienna to cerulean blue, it will start to turn almost green. What can be helpful here is to add a bit of red to the mix so that it will get more neutral result. You can get really lovely light mixes from this too. Sometimes with these granulating blue pigments, you can see they are already separating on the palette. If you add lots of water, then sometimes you can already see them separating on the paper too. It's starting to happen here. It can be quite nice if you have clouds that have different colors in them and these cloud shadow gradients These would be the most classic and standard mixes so to speak. You could also use unusual pairs to try out for example maybe a warm red and a green, or an Indian red, which is a very intense earth tone, or an indigo, which is really dark blue or dark yellow like connector on gold. You can also do all of these mixes or try out all of these mixes by adding raw sienna. Depending on your variety of raw sienna this will also turn slightly greenish. You will need to mix in a little bit of pink. I just want to encourage you to really try out your palate and really try out combining different colors with each other. If you have difficulty seeing the potential colors in your clouds or if you don't really feel experimental, then you could also use for example your phone or change the colors of your photo on the computer and just exaggerate the cloud colors a bit. Very often just slightly exaggerated colors like heightening the saturation can help you to find interesting color combinations. Just don't overdo it, [LAUGHTER] but keep it really interesting and subtle. Like these combinations, there's a little bit of red in here, there's a little bit of blue. These contrasts will help you to get a more interesting sketch in the end. 6. Painting White Clouds And Cloud Shadows: Let's take a look at how you can show the white part of clouds and also cloud shadows. I'll start with this type of really fluffy, good weather, white clouds which are also called cumulus clouds. For these big white clouds, I like to paint around the white areas with blue paint. I find it really helps with watercolor to leave some parts of the paper white because it's really the whitest that you can get. It looks really more convincing to me than painting everything blue and then blotting out paint again. For small areas, you can definitely use this and for other types of clouds, it's also fine. But for these big clouds I find it's best to leave wide areas of clouds and then go in later and paint in the shadows. Let's try this out. I have a nice amount of blue, this ultramarine. I want a big puddle of blue so that I don't have to re-mix my paint in the middle of painting. I will simply start by painting around the white parts, and just imagining what this could look like. Then adding a nice amount of paint around this as the sky part. As I'm leaving one area, I want to make sure that there's a puddle of really wet paint so that I can go into other areas and actually paint those and then come back to this without getting any weird drying lines. I'm also trying to make this bottom part a bit lighter. We've talked about that often, the sky is darker on the top, and a bit lighter near the horizon so I'm trying to be mindful of this. As I'm painting, I'm also trying to keep these bumps really irregular. I'll actually go back in here and try to change this up a little bit, because they're not like these cartoon clouds where all of the bumps are really the same size. In nature, everything is always a bit irregular, and this makes it look a bit better. I think that looks nice, I'm going to soften the edge down here a bit more. Then I'm going to let this dry. When the layer is dry, we can add in the cloud shadow. Another thing before I go and let this dry is, I want the edge a bit softer here. What you can actually do is plot this out slightly. If you want to make your cloud shape bigger, then this is one technique you can use, but you need to make sure that the paint is still wet in this stage, so that you can actually remove the paint. I've smudged a bit here with my blue paint, but not to worry because it will be covered later by the cloud shadow. In the meantime, I will start a second sketch in which I will start with the shadow of the cloud. This is another technique to do this. I'll quickly mix up a bit of ultramarine and burnt sienna to get a nice gray, adding lots of water to make this really soft and nice gray. Then I will start by imagining what the cloud shadow might look like. Again, I want to keep this irregular. I can also pick out some of the areas and add water to the edge to make them feather out. I could also blot some of the areas to achieve these soft edges. Up here, I want a few of these boulders to show and maybe a bit of a softening effect here. Now that my paper is more or less dry, I can go back in and add some clouds shadows. I'm going to do this with the same mix I used down here. What I want to try is wetting a few of these areas so that I can get a really nice soft mix. I don't want too much water, just a little bit so that it will spread around a bit. Down here, I want the shadow or rather the edge to be visible. Then with a clean brush, I can go back in and soften the edge again slightly. This is one great method to paint a cloud with a shadow in two steps. Now for the other one, a lot of ultramarine here. I just need to figure out a way to paint around everything here that makes sense. I don't want the cloud to be too small, and I don't want it to be too regular. After some of these lines, I will need to have to paint around it. When you do it like this try to think about these negative shapes that are forming here, instead of just focusing on the blue. In that way you will get really nice round fluffy clouds. I'm okay if some of these areas overlap a bit. I can even try to soften this effect a bit more. I've cleaned my brush in water and then dabbed it on a painting rag, so that it's dry. Then I can soften these edges a little bit. I don't want to do this everywhere, just in a few areas. These are two methods to get more or less the same result a fluffy cloud with a nice gray shadow painted in two layers. Try both techniques, they're really interesting. Depending on how I feel that day, I might go for one or for the other. 7. Composition For Sky And Cloud Sketches: I'd like to talk a bit about composition and how to frame a sketch that's mainly about the clouds or the sky. In essence, sky sketches are really very simple landscape paintings and you will want to bring this part of the landscape into focus. So if it's about the clouds then make it about the clouds. Keep the ground very, very simple or leave it out entirely. You can see in these small sketches that's definitely a possibility. Always place the horizon line rather low than making it a big part of the picture so that you will have a lot of room to show your sky or your clouds. Of course, other compositional rules still apply. So Take care to balance out bigger and smaller elements and arrange them into interesting patterns. Don't group everything directly in the middle, but rather distribute it so that it has a nice flow. With these really dynamic subjects that clouds are, you can take a lot of creative freedom to actually do this and change a few of the shapes that you can see. Create interest by having a foreground and a background. Clouds also have perspective rules. So you have big clouds and the foreground and then smaller clouds that are layering into the background, and you can take advantage of this. So you can show their diminishing size by making them smaller and flatter near the horizon and like here, bigger at the top. So sometimes finding a pleasing composition is not so easy since some skies appear very smooth and flat, and in that case, you can definitely move elements or make them up if you need to. So clouds are really very variable shapes. Another thing that you could try out is to bring in small elements like a tree at the bottom or maybe two birds passing in the sky. These are small points of interests and they will usually be enough to guide the eye through the picture. Like in this sketch, I thought it would be nice to frame the sunset scene and these dramatic dark clouds with just a few small buildings and the skyline that you can see here. This adds a bit of contrast, but it also serves as an anchor point for the eyes. Whereas in these small sketches, I decided to forego the entirety of any kind of horizon line and I simply focused on just the sky and the clouds as they are. So you decide what your sketch is about. Another thing I would like to add is that watercolor sky sketches are an area where less is often more. I always try to keep my skies as simple as I possibly can to avoid any kind of overworking or fiddling too much with paint layers and stuff like that. I will definitely touched up areas if I see the need for that, but I tried to get in and out of the painting with as few brush strokes as possible. I always try to remind myself too that it's okay if any of these shapes don't really look exactly like I saw them because clouds are really variable and morphing and moving all the time, and so for me, it's more about capturing how a scene fields than about being exact in every little shape. So I hope these compositional tips and also how I approach these kinds of sketches helps you for your own compositions. 8. Demo: Fluffy Clouds: In this lesson, we'll paint these classic good weather cumulus clouds, and we'll start by pre-wetting the entire page with water, then letting the water sink in a little bit. I'll have mixed a big puddle of ultramarine blue and I'll just going to drop it onto the wet paper and it spreads wonderfully, but I try to make sure I leave big wide areas for the actual clouds to be in. I'll drop in more pigment at the top to make that sky a section of a bit darker. I try to sculpt out the white parts of the clouds here. I try to make these cloud shapes a bit irregular so they don't all look the same. This will be more and more pleasing composition in the end. Again, I'm dropping in a bit more paint at the top. Then I start while the paper is still wet to blot away blue paint that spreads into the white to preserve these nice big wide spaces on my paper. As I work my way down with a blue, I try to fade it out slightly so that it's softer and paler near the horizon. You can also see this in the reference. I also try to make my clouds space slightly smaller and flatter, because again, this is what happens to the clouds when you see them in perspective. I do all of this while my paper is still sufficiently wet so that I have nice soft edges. Again, I'm blotting out pigment so that I can have nice big fluffy clouds. Then I'll let everything dry. I've pre-mixed the soft gray here for my clouds from ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. Now I'm pre-wetting those white areas again so that I can have feathered edges, soft edges for these cloud shadows. I don't want any harsh lines in these clouds. I drop in the pigment, my gray mix, and I blot it out where I think it's too harsh. This technique relies on a lot of blotting with paper towel. If you don't blot it away, then you will get a few more edges, which doesn't have to be bad. You can see in the reference that you will have more defined clouds depending on the weather. There are several possibilities to paint this and also depending on the time you might have. This takes a bit longer pre-wetting the areas. I'm being very careful with the paint and I'm working my way down the entire page here. Again, as I work my way down to the horizon with the cloud shadows. Remember, the clouds fade out in the distance. You have smaller clouds, you have flatter and paler shadows. I will just go over these areas once, and I know that I have to darken my cloud shadows at the top a little bit more when they're dry. Again, I'm feathering out these clouds here. I'm going over these edge areas with clean water. Now that the top layers have almost dried, I'm dropping in a bit more pigment to darken my cloud shadows. I'm doing this as the paper is still wet, as the wash is still wet so that it can spread nice and evenly. This technique relies a lot on knowing when is the right moment to drop in paint onto your paper. I would say if you see a sheen, like you can see right now on camera, if you see this glistening area on your paper, then it's okay to still drop in paint. If it's not moist anymore. If the wash is already starting to dry, then you will get weird effects. You will get these cauliflower backgrounds if you drop in pigment at that stage. This is something that might look nice for these clouds, but it also can look a bit weird and unintended, so I try not to do it. The mix that I'm using is still very light. I try to be very subtle with these clouds shadows not to make them too strong, so that they don't look like storm clouds. This is the most intense pigment concentration that you will see in this demonstration. It still spreads around, so it will not be as intense when it's dry. I'm trying to be very careful about this. It's a nice and relaxing process to paint these clouds. As you saw, you can always wet an area again to soften the clouds and their shadows, so you can definitely correct areas after they've dried, if you like. 9. Demo: Airy Clouds: In this lesson, we're going to paint cirrus clouds, these high and airy clouds. This is going to be fun. The first thing I'll do is I'll fill my entire paper with graded wash. I'll start with ultramarine blue at the top, and then I'll fade that into cerulean blue, so slightly lighter near the bottom and near the horizon. I make sure that my page is evenly filled, that I have an even graded wash. We practiced this in an earlier lesson. I'm taking my time to do this nice even blue rectangle. I want almost no paint, no pigment at the bottom here. As I'm finished, I'm just dropping in a bit more pigment into the wet layer. I try to do this evenly so that I don't get any unsightly streaks. I think this looks very nice. As long as the area is still moist, I can blot out the pigment with a paper towel, and I'm trying to crumple it together in a way that reflects these interesting cirrus clouds. I try to get these slight curves in the clouds. This take a bit of experimentation to get it right or get it to look nice. Another thing that you could do is use a brush handle with a paper towel wrapped around it, and then just draw into the wet paper. If the paint is still too wet and you're applying too much pressure, then you will get dark streaks. You can see this here in my demonstration, but I could have waited a bit longer. But, you can see this effect here. Make sure to wait a bit longer than me to apply this effect. But all in all, this is a very simple but effective technique and it's also a lot of fun to do, so make sure to try it out. Easy way to paint some nice cirrus clouds. 10. Demo: Rainy clouds: For this lesson, I have chosen rainy or mixed weather clouds again. I now want to paint them a bit differently with a lighter blue. As a base for my gray, I have chosen a cerulean blue this time and again I've mixed in burnt sienna and then water down the mix to a nice light gray. You can already see on the paper that the cerulean blue is bringing out this nice amount of granulations, really a lovely pigment. For this area, in the middle I will just add this dense block of gray paint and then in a minute, we will start and blot it out again a little bit so that it is broken up and you can actually see different layers of clouds like you can see in the reference. I'm continuing my wash right to the horizon and then right down at the horizon, I'm adding a bit of a darker layer to fade into the rest of the gray. This will indicate this horizon line. I'm spreading the gray around a bit more, introducing a bit more cerulean blue at the top. I'm also dropping in a bit of yellow ocher and gray in the middle there to make it more interesting. You don't necessarily see these colors always in the reference, but I think they make for a nice addition. Now that the paint layer is almost dry, almost but not quite, I can go in with my paper towel and pick out white area. So it doesn't matter that they don't end up completely white, it's gray day. Now I can blot out these few storm clouds in the middle there and they stay in place. They just fade a little at the edges so I have really nice soft feathery edges like that. In the same way with the paper, almost dry, I introduce new paint. In this stage, it doesn't spread around as much. It still does a little bit again, for these soft edges. In this stage you have to be a bit careful. You don't want to go in with a lot of water, so you have to have a fairly dry brush. This is a dry brushing technique. You brush in these soft clouds shadows with just a bit of pigment on the brush and not too much water. I also try to keep it simple so I don't go over the same areas more than once. Here I'm adding straight lines for these smaller, less defined clouds near the horizon. That's essentially it. I don't want to overwork this. I think it looks fine as it is and I can now add some faraway mountains near the horizon again, to frame the sketch and give it a little bit more contrast and substance at the bottom. I'm adding those mountains in the back with a mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, the same mix that you could use for cloud shadows. I'm just keeping it a bit bluer to show the paleness of the mountains. Right near the edge, the closest to the viewer, I'm adding a bit more blue to show this aerial perspective, this landscape that is coming towards the viewer and having more substance and more color in it. Now that this is dry, I think I could add one more element to make this sketch more interesting. I've decided I would like to add a few birds. I'm tentatively sketching them in with pencil first to see if the positioning is right and I like it. I can go over this with the same dark cloud mix from before and add the birds in this dark gray. As a last step, I'm reducing the contrast a bit and blot away a bit of the color for the birds so that they blend into the sky. 11. Demo: Sunset: In this lesson, we're going to paint a sunset, and I've prepared by mixing a puddle of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, a very dark mix for this dark dramatic sky at the top. I've also another puddle of this bright orange that you can see near the horizon. I'm starting to apply the paint with really decisive strokes, this dark mixture here. I'm adding more water to my brush to fade this out slightly towards the lower middle. So this is another example for a graded wash. I'm adding a bit more of the ultramarine here. I'm making sure I have enough water on my paper, and I want to fade out this mix. So I'm lightening the mix, and bit for bit, I'm working my way towards the horizon. I'm leaving a bit of space so I don't fill the entire page with my blue mix because I still want to have space for the orange. Before it dries entirely, I want to have this really dark mixture right there at the top. So it's really supposed to be a night sky. I want this really dark contrast. Again, be careful with this, don't introduce too much water, otherwise you will get backgrounds. I'm making these large swiping motions with my brush to distribute the paint really evenly, and to have this nice graded wash that goes from very dark, almost black blue to almost transparent. Then I let this dry entirely, and now I can go back with my orange. I've mixed an orange with just a tiny amount of quinacridone pink to make it a bit redder. I want to apply this really bright orange near the horizon. So I want to fade this into the other direction. I want to start with a really intense color and then add a bit of water to my brush to fade this towards the blue. I don't overlap these two layers too much to avoid any weird glazing effect. So if I overlap orange and blue, then it will likely turn muddy or greenish or grayish and I don't want that in this sunset situation. I want to show that the sun is still glowing behind these hills. I'm introducing just a tiny bit more of the pink, and then working these two layers into each other. Again, I'm letting everything dry, and I premixed a dark purple. So this is ultramarine blue, quinacridone, magenta, and a bit of burnt sienna to make this interesting purple dark cloud. Then with just a few decisive strokes with my flat brush, I'm applying and brushing in the cloud. I don't want to make it too dark. So the darker and the top, that's fading out. Right there at the bottom where it goes into this orange area, I think my paper is still a bit wet, so the paint spreads and softens the cloud edge at the bottom a bit. This wasn't planned, but it's really okay. It's looking quite nice actually. Then I rush in some lighter clouds below with this same mix, a bit more diluted so that it's lighter. I don't want to overpower this with a really dark mix, and I also want to keep it simple. So just a few cloud banks in front of this orange mix. Again, I let this dry. Then I come back with this really dark mix of again, ultramarine and burnt sienna. I add the dark trees and houses. So the silhouette really brings out the contrast and it accentuates the brightness of the setting sun and this is really what I'm going for. With the flat side of my brush, I'm adding in trees and houses, and again, I'm looking for irregular shapes, not too much of the same to make this more interesting and pleasing to look at. I'm trying to balance out the composition like this. Adding chimney, and then just a bit more of this on the trees, and that's essentially it for this sketch. So the orange stands out against this dark silhouette very nicely I think. This makes for a great sunset sketch. 12. Demo: Sunrise: In this lesson, I want to paint a sunrise with very soft pink sky and some clouds in front of it. The sun just peeking through. I've pretty wet my paper, and to let the water sink in a bit, I can mix my colors in the meantime. I have this very diluted purple mix here with cobalt blue burnt sienna, and a little bit of Quinacridone Magenta to induce this purplish color, which is very subtle. I'm adding in more of the blue and the burnt sienna now to make it darker and near the horizon. Now I have a pastel pink mix with a bit of Quinacridone rose and this Naples yellow and a bit of white so that I have this really baby pink. I'm applying this in very light strokes to get this very subtle color. With these subtle pinks, I need to have a really clean brush. At the top I want to have another band of this more purple color. I'm also leaving out a bit of space for these brighter clouds that are illuminated by the sun. I noticed that I need to add a bit more concentrated pink and Naples yellow mix so that I can really see where the sun breaks through these morning clouds there. I intensify a few of these colors while everything is still nice and moist on the page. After everything has dried you can see I cross some background by adding paint that was a bit too wet. I can probably add a few clouds over that so it's not the end of the world. At the top, I'm starting by adding a few clouds in this light Naples yellow mix. I don't want to overwork this as always. I'll just go in there with my round brush and try to get these small cloud shapes right. Very soft touches. Nearer to the sun I will add in more pink to show that the light changes. Then right in front of the rising sun, I add a very diluted mix of these darker clouds. This purple mixture, and luckily I can paint over the areas where I dropped in the Naples yellow earlier to show the sun peeking through. This cost these backgrounds that I don't quite like for this morning situation. I can just very lightly paint over this. You can see from the reference, I don't follow the reference too closely rather I put the clouds where I think they will look nice [LAUGHTER] in my picture, if that makes any sense. I'm taking a bit of artistic license here to compose my sketch in a way that's pleasing to the eye instead of blindly following the reference. You can absolutely do this in your own sketches too. I'm also making sure to keep the cloud shapes irregular, to keep my brushwork light. Here in this lower area, the clouds are flatter so I can just use a flat brush strokes. They were a bit too slanted for my liking, so I blotted them out and try to do a nicer version [LAUGHTER] of them again with this very light and diluted mix of Quinacridone purple and the gray that I used before. What I also try in this sketch is to vary the colors of the clouds a bit and make them pleasing to the eye. Basically, I think that's it. A nice serene morning scene with the sun just coming up and a few clouds in front of that. I think the sketch is basically finished at this point. 13. Demo: Thunderstorm: For this lesson I want to paint a dark thunderstorm cloud with lots of rain in the back. I don't have a reference for this, but I have this picture in my mind of how I want it to look and I'm actually starting with the lightest area with the horizon line and I mixed this light Naples yellow white mix with a bit of this bluish gray. I fade this out to the top, I need a lot of water for this because this is going to be almost entirely wet and wet. I have this dark mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna as always; it's trusty mix, and I'm introducing it, I'm dropping it down onto the wet paper here. I want it to be really intense at the end. I noticed that my paper wants to tilted and the paint runs down too much. I don't want this, so I keep it level by tilting it a bit into the other direction. We're changing the angle like this. You can control how much the paint flows into any direction. Right now I want it to stay where it is basically. It will still fade out a bit because the paper is wet, but yeah. I want to have this really dark, dramatic cloud there, this thunder storm, rainstorm cloud. With a clean dry brush, I can pick up excess water. I don't want to have too much water in this area. The paint will flow back into this, but that's fine. I just want this to be a bit more controlled if that's possible at all. This light line of yellow ocher will be the ground level later, the horizon line. At this stage, I want everything to flow into each other. I don't need any defined lines. This will come in the second step. I'm adding a bit more of the light gray to this middle part here, and I'm dragging out the edges on the left for this effect of heavy rain and the distance. You can see there's this big cloud at the top, and then you have this effect of heavy rain that you can see in the distance. I don't know if you've seen this at any point in your life. It looks really amazing and this is just the effect that I'm going for. I feel I need more of these dark dramatic thunderstorm clouds, so I'm charging in with more color and I have added a bit of purple actually for these really dark almost black rain clouds. Again, since these things tend to disappear with wet-on- wet, I'm dragging out a bit more of these darker areas here. On the right side, I don't want any rain effects. I just want it in one place, so I'm picking up paint with my almost dry brush here. This always comes to down to a bit of trial and error. You can't do too early, but also not too late. It always depends on how much water is on the page and on the brush. Try it for yourself and see what you can learn from the reactions of the paint and the water. I really like how this turned out, the dramatic clouds and the rain effect. Now it's time to just redefine the horizon line a bit with the yellow ocher and this shows the land. I'm also adding a bit of raw amber to have a bit of variation, but essentially, this ground, this landscape is just a few straight lines that show there's actually a bit of definition in this entire thunderstorm. Here comes a bit more of my gray mix that will just flow into the yellow ocher and this is the finished sketch. 14. Your Project + Final Thoughts: I hope you followed along with me and have tried out how much fun it can be to paint quick watercolor clouds and skies. We've tried out different techniques from very simple braided washes to multi-layer watercolor clouds. Now it's your turn. I'd love to see some clouds or sky sketches with the techniques that we practiced in this class. Make sure you upload your watercolor sketches in the project section and you can either post the finished painting or your explorations and studies, which is also always really interesting. Make sure you follow me on Skillshare so that you get notified about my new sketching classes, and of course, in the meantime, feel free to explore my other classes which can help you to practice your sketching and painting skills. I'd be super happy if you could leave a review for the class. This helps me and the other students a lot. That's it for now. I'll see you very soon. Bye.