Illustrating Skies. A DEEP DIVE Course On How You Can Learn To Master Skies

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tom KahseKl. In this class, I'll share what I know about drawing and painting skies. I've been working professionally as an illustrator for 14 years now. I've worked as a children's picture book artist for many of those years and illustrating fiction and non fiction books and working with a range of different authors. I've spent a lot of time working in animation, doing backgrounds and storyboards, and I do editorial and book cover work and sometimes advertising too. I try to draw and paint in my spare time. One of the most exciting things to draw, in my opinion, is the sky. The sky is mysterious and constantly shifting, full of shapes, colors, patterns. Making an image, it's always my favorite part and where I feel I can be most expressive. Once you understand some simple things about how skis work, you'll feel confident to make them the most exciting part of your illustrations. The best part is the sky is always right above us, providing ever changing inspiration for your next art work. So many people find the sky difficult or intimidating to illustrate, but it really doesn't need to be. There's a few simple things you can do to construct them, which we'll explain and go over in this course, it's then the place that you can be the most free and the most expressive. Once you finish the course, you'll have so much more confidence to draw skies from scratch and make them one of the most enjoyable things to illustrate. The sky sets the tone and the mood for the whole image. You can communicate a lot to the viewer about what's going on in your image with your choice of sky. I think that learning how to add engaging skies to my images has helped me hugely in getting work as an illustrator and being able to communicate a brief or story effectively. I think it's a useful course skill for any image maker to learn. So I've created this class to share my approach to painting skies. I'm going to walk you through my process step by step and show you exactly how I do it. A few key lessons we'll cover our perspective values, collecting references, creating thumbnails, choosing a color palette, choosing the right brushes, using adjustment layers. By the end of this class, you'll have created an engaging digitally painted sky. After taking this class, you'll be well on your way to improving your skies and as a result, your overall illustrations. Provide you with a template to work in folder of reference photos I've taken, and I'm also going to leave you with some resources to help you choose which sky to use going forward and also some brushes that you can use to paint these skis. I'm excited to teach this class this is definitely the part of illustration that I enjoy doing the most and I really feel like you were too. I hope you can join me in the next video where I'll be covering what you need to get started. 2. The Class Project: So much for joining me in this course. This class is going to firstly go over some of the ideas and ways of approaching the sky so that I can share some lessons I've learned that have really helped me. I've tried to condense down what I've learned into the essential things you need to know to get started. Then I'm going to take you through the class projects where you'll be drawing your own sky and I'll show you some of the techniques I use when I make my illustrations and you can follow along with each step. Chose a sunset for our class project because it's a great place to start. There's an endless variety of ways you can draw them and they really give your imagery a lot of drama. For the class project, here's the image that I'm going to show you how to create. I chose this scene with a lovely warm sunset as it's one of the most interesting times of day to explore in terms of light. It also has a lot of the ingredients that I want to discuss. We can look at clouds and how the light works with them and have the opportunity to use bold vibrant colors. Provided a pre drawn foreground and midground layer so that we can just focus on the sky for this lesson. I've opted for a beach scene because that way we get the full range of the sky right down to the horizon line. We can see everything that's going on. Often the lowest part of the sky is obstructed by trees or buildings in an image. But over the sea, we can see how the sky appears in the far distance. This class, I'll be demonstrating in Adobe Photoshop and I'm using a Wackom Syntique drawing tablet. Any previous Wacom tablet or drawing device is fine and you can also follow along on the iPad in Procreate too. For both Photoshop and Procreate, I've created some brushes that you can download with this course that you can use to paint your skies with. Let's get going. Before we start drawing the sky, there's going to be a few quick videos with the vital lessons on understanding how it works. This is such a useful step and you can draw along with these videos. Helped me a lot. And if you feel like you already know these things, you can skip through to the next video, but I really encourage you to get a grounding in these fundamentals. So see you in the next video where we'll be covering the basics of how a sky works. 3. Materials and Tools: Hi there. Welcome back. In this video, we're going to look at the materials and tools that you need for this course. Everything that you need is provided by me, apart from things like the programs and your setup. If you're working on a syntque or if you're working on a drawing tablet or an iPad, I'm demonstrating this class all in Photoshop. I'm providing some procreate resources that you can use. If you're a competent procreate user, I'm sure you'll be able to follow along and match the things I'm doing. Here's some of the working files and the open PSD of the final artwork. Also get files to follow along in. So files for the fundamental lessons, you'll have PSD files that you can open up and draw directly into. And then I'm supplying brushes, so my complete brush collection for Photoshop comes with this course. And if you're a procreate user, you can have my procreate brushes. There's also things like sky starters that I've supplied, and I'll show you firstly just quickly how to import brushes into Photoshop if you don't know already. So we've opened Photoshop. I'll go to window brushes that opens up this little brush box here. So if you go to this tab brush these little lines here, and then you can say import brushes. In my resources pack, I'll click on Tom's complete Photoshop brushes and press open, then they're all in here. You've got sketching brushes, fine art brushes. If we hide these two layers, brushes in there to play with, all sorts going on. Texture brushes. But what I want to show you and draw your attention to is the sky brushes. So in here, you got things like brushes to draw your clouds with, but also brushes to build up the atmosphere. So we've got two of those skybse builder and the atmosphere brush. You can paint them with those. And then down the bottom of here, we've also got birds. Painting birds like that. These are all brushes that I've created over the years that have been really useful for me. Also things like space brushes. Then I've got things like stars. Nebula. There's all sorts in there. There's loads of resources to check out, loads of brushes. It's got my fire brushes in there as well. I hope you like those. Then in terms of other resources, there's my sky collection. All of these reference pictures. There's documents to draw in, perspective documents, brush mark documents. Then when we look at doing the final artwork, there's a file called TCC skies class artwork, your version, and then there's my version. If you open up your version, you'll see that it's ready to paint in. This will be the one where we do our final artwork. We've got our perspective there. We've got our foreground elements that I've already pre drawn in there on a locked group, but you can unlock that and move things around if you want to move the guy. Do whatever you want there, lock that up. But yeah, if you add a new layer here and then we'll be drawing into the sky. Yeah. So those are the materials for the course, and you'll find them all on so you'll find all your resources. With the class where you downloaded it, there'll be a folder called class resources. So take a look through those, download all the stuff, and yeah, start importing it and we can get ready to start the course. All right, great. I'll see you in the next video. 4. The Basics: Hi there. Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to explain some of the basic ideas about how skies work. I'll try not to get too sciencey, but having a basic understanding of how they work really helped me think about how to draw them. I think it will be helpful to explain that now. I like to think of the sky being made up of three components, the atmosphere, which is the backdrop. It's the big seemingly empty space behind. Then you have the sun, the light source, then you have the clouds and these are the main features on our sky. I sometimes imagine them like characters or actors placed on top of a backdrop. Here you can see the three components of a sky and putting them together makes a complete sky. So the atmosphere, this is the vast layer of gases that forms the backdrop of our sky. It changes color throughout the day depending on the position of the sun. Visually, we see the sky as a gradient with the lightest colors near the horizon and the darkest richest colors directly above us. But this flips sunrise and sunset where we get richer and more saturated colors near the horizon. Sun is the primary light source in the sky, the moon is at night. When the sun is high in the sky, we see lots of light on the landscape. When it's low in the sky, we see less light. As it sets, we see the sunlight through more of the atmosphere. That light is scattered and we see different colors such as reds and oranges. The lower the sun, the longer the shadows and the darker the values of things in our scene. You don't always need to have a visible sun or a visible light source in your illustrations. Sometimes having your sun or your light source off camera is just as effective and the clouds. The clouds are the main feature of our skies. They give the sky depth perspective. Large clouds above us feel close, while tiny clouds near the horizon indicate that they are really far away. Clouds react to light, showing us where the light source is, our sun or our moon, where that's located. They also tell a story about the weather and the mood of our image. Clouds are organic in shape, allowing for expressive painting. They typically have flatter bottoms and bulging tops. Many different types of cloud, but simply bigger clouds equal a higher chance of bad weather and small tiny wispy clouds mean lots of light from the sun and a brighter day. When we approach a sky, we go through this three step process. First, we draw the atmosphere, then we draw in the sun or decide where it will go and then we add the cloud. Break it down into its main parts, the process becomes less intimidating. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that, really. Of course, this guy does all sorts of weird and wonderful things from time to time, but if you start with these three parts in mind, you won't go wrong. Here's just a breakdown. We have our atmosphere in the background, which is a gradient. We have our light source, which in this illustration I have off camera, and then we have our clouds which tell us information about where the light source is, but also what day it is. Join me in the next video where we'll be looking at atmospheric perspective. 5. Atmospheric Perspective: Hi there. In this video, I'm going to talk you through atmospheric perspective, understanding how eye sees objects in the distance and understanding generally atmospheric perspective has massively improved my images I feel. I think it can really help anyone looking to paint environments or scenes or backgrounds and painting physically, digitally. I'll show a few techniques I use to implement this, but also explain how to think about it and understand it, which is really key. And I hope you find this useful. So if artists aiming to create convincing landscapes or environments, achieving a sense of depth is essential. And a simple way to do this is by understanding and applying the principles of atmospheric perspective. So mastering this technique will significantly enhance your work and help you use depth to your advantage. And really, when you're painting a scene or creating a world or a painting, you really want to make the viewer feel like it goes back, there's depth. It's alive. You almost want to create that illusion of Fred and really allow the viewer to get lost in the image or in the world. It really helps make a world way more convincing, I feel. So atmospheric perspective mimics the way our atmosphere affects the appearance of objects as they recede into the distance. So it does this in a number of ways. I'll show you them now. So saturation. So objects in the foreground tend to be more saturated. This is all how the eye sees objects or how the eye sees environment. So the eye will see the foreground, the sky directly above us as much more saturated blues than the sky right in the distance. And it will see trees and objects in the foreground in much higher saturation than it does objects in the background. So next we're going to talk about value and contrast. Elements in the foreground tend to be much darker in value, and elements in the background, especially in the far distance, tend to be much lighter in value. Now, this is a blanket rule, but it tends to hold up generally. Obviously, sometimes you might have a really dark cloud and there might be something lit up in the foreground. But as an overall system of kind of thinking about it, objects that are closer to the eye tend to have darker values, and objects really far in the distance have much, much lighter values. So you can use this for your skies or for how you stagger the landscape. I tend to if something's not feeling right and it's not feeling far back enough, I'll lighten it up just in order to kind of drop it further into the distance. The next one is detail. Objects close to the eye tend to have a lot more detail and then detail recedes as it goes into the background. That's super useful to remember, especially when you can zoom in on Photoshop or Procreate and keep adding detail. Those things in the background, they really don't need as much detail as you think. Focusing on your detail in the foreground will really help your image communicate, de so this also applies to color. Atmospheric applies to color. Color temperature also plays a role and warmer colors are typically used for closer objects and found in the foreground. And as you recede into the background, everything gets cooler. It's the way atmosphere works, the way the e sees through the atmosphere. There's much more of it as you go into the distance and it tends to cool objects down in terms of their color. I tend to add a little bit of blue to objects and then the further away they are, the more blue I add to them. This is a really helpful one. Then clarity. This is really key. Objects in the foreground for the eye tend to be much sharper and clearer. Then as they recede, objects in the distance become hazier and less distinct. You can use a sharper brush or you're adding more detail, but um things can be softer as they go into the background and that will really help create depth in your image. Yeah, I found that one really helpful. As a recap, in the foreground, you have more saturated colors, darker values, warmer colors, more detail and sharper objects. In the background, you have less saturation, lighter values, cooler colors, less detail and things are less sharp. Now let's have a look at how some of those techniques and ideas can be put into your illustrations or your digital paintings. 6. What is your sky communicating?: Hi. In this video in the course, we're going to look at what is your sky communicating? What kind of message is your sky sending to the viewer and looking at how you can choose a different sky to get across a different feeling in an image or say something or communicate something to the viewer. Generally, broadly speaking, bright skies equal good news in an image and dark skies equal bad news. I mean, it's a bit more complicated than this, but generally, as an overall rule, this kind of works. So bright skies mean good news because there's lots of light and lots of atmosphere visible. There's not many clouds and all the values are quite light, and there's not many shadows, lots of highlights. So we kind of get a warm, positive, hopeful feeling from bright skies, whereas dark skies tend to mean bad news. You have less light. The atmosphere is barely visible. It's mostly covered in cloud, and you have longer shadows, darker values everywhere, moody weather often, and that can kind of spell negative consequences for whatever's going on in the image or a feeling of urgency. Let's look at some of these examples. When to use sunrises, sunrises are often associated with feelings of optimism and the excitement of a new beginning. They symbolize the start of an adventure and the promise of a whole day ahead. I find sunrises tend to be yellower. Sometimes you can do them in a pinky way, but they tend to bathe everything in light and have a kind of haze, and they're really useful for kind of giving that sense of hope for the new day. So here's some other paintings of sunrises. They kind of tend to be quite hopeful and positive. So daytime skies when to use them at midday, the sun is at its highest casting short shadows and bathing everything in bright even light. Midday skies are perfect for scenes are easy going, calm or content. The strong consistent light can suggest that all is well in the illustration. Time scenes are quite neutral, so you can use them for middle parts of stories or conversation or just introducing people or characters. But I tend to use daytime for that kind of thing and not so much for the big special moments in a story. There's some other examples of nice daytime scenes. They tend to be quite neutral, positive. There's not much sense of danger in them. So bad weather, when to use bad weather? Bad weather can add drama and tension to an image. Stormy skies with dark clouds and heavy rain create a sense of unease and urgency, perfect for depicting conflict or struggle. Conversely, a gentle drizzle or overcast sky can evoke feelings of melancholy and reflection, adding depth to more contemplative scenes. Here's an example of a moody weather scene. And you can see that there's a kind of feeling of struggle in that painting. And here's some more examples of kind of ominous feeling of clouds coming over. The tension that clouds blocking most of the sky gives is really useful. Heavy rain or the heavy kind of overcast sky with not much light coming through tends to give a feeling of melancholy. Golden hour. This is obviously one of the loveliest times of day to be out and about. I use golden hour settings for images that need a sense of magic, hope or enjoyment. It's a time when people make the most of the final moments of daylight, capturing a sense of fleeting beauty and cherished moments. You use golden hour for uplifting positive moments, and Golden hour is great for casting that lovely glowing orangy yellow light onto everything in the scene. This is a really lovely time and it's a time where the aspects of your image tend to be well lit, whereas sunset, they start to get darker in value. Golden Hour is a really useful time to bathe everything in that golden so here's a couple more examples and you'll see that one on the right, there's just that warm. It's a really useful time of day to get across that positive lovely glowing feeling. Sunset when to use the sunset sunsets can add a sense of warmth and calm to your illustration symbolizing the end of a fulfilling day in the promise of a peaceful night. They convey a feeling of closure and serenity, enhancing your image with a soft emotional glow. Here's an example of a nice sunset. The sun is already almost out of view and everything's warm and orange and red and there's pinks and everything has that warm glow. It's a really great time of day for capturing the ending of something. It symbolizes the ending of a day, but it also can symbolize the end of a story or an end of a chapter. It has that closure feeling, and it's a great time of day to illustrate in an image because draws people in, and people long for that experience and that time of day, and it really evokes something in people's memories. Giving it that kind of warm closure such a useful time of day. So night skies night skies convey both optimism and pessimism, clear, starry skies, feel hopeful and serene, perfect for positive scenes, whereas cloudy night skies with a glimpse of the moon, create a moody, spooky atmosphere, enhancing feelings of unease and tension. Here we've got a night sky, the sky and the moon is completely obscured by cloud, and therefore we get that spooky, tense ominous feeling. Yeah, cloudy night skies are great for doing mystery novels or scenes where something bad is about to happen. The light being obscured by the clouds. There's not much light around anyway from the moon and the stars, but when that lights obscured, you have that feeling of something bad's about to happen in the image. When you have no cloud in the sky, it gives a feeling of wonder and mystery looking up at the stars. And a night sky can be equally as positive as, you know, a daytime sky, depending on how you lay out your image. But, yeah, if you're going if you're going for something tense and urgent and scary, you want to add lots of clouds into your night sky. And if you're going for something very hopeful, you want to take out the clouds from your night sky or have very few just so that you can really get all that light from the stars and the moon to bathe your scene in that nice bluey tone. Here, I've done a graph that's kind of a generalization, really, but on the left hand side, light increasing. So going from dark skies to very bright skies and then on the bottom, how we're feeling about an image. So from quite negative to positive, negative feeling about an image isn't a bad thing. It's just about what you're trying to communicate to the audience. So you trying to tell the audience that this scene is ominous, tense, there's a foreboding, then you want to go for not much light that will give you that result. Then if you want to go for something warm, optimistic, calm, hopeful, you want to go for something with lots of light clear skies, sunrises, sunsets, things in the middle tends to be daytime skies or melancholy weather. But yeah, this is a bit of a generalization, but I think it holds just as a recap, bright sky is good news, dark sky is bad news, bright skies have lots of light. There's lots of atmosphere visible. There's not many clouds. All the values in the sky are very light, but also in the scene are very light because there's lots of light bathing them. There's very small shadows because the sun is very high in the sky and you get highlights on things, dark skies meaning bad news, there's much less light. The atmosphere is not really visible. There's so much cloud covering it. The shadows are very long where they are. And you have much darker values, especially in the foreground, you get really, really dark values and moody weather. The moodier the weather, the moodier the feeling in your image. Great. So see you in the next video. 7. Collecting References: The sky is a constant yet ever changing canvas and no two skies are ever the same. I find it really useful to take pictures whenever I see an interesting sky that might inspire my illustrations. I just use my phone and keep these photos in a folder on my computer labeled skies. This way, when I start a new project, I have a collection of personal reference images to draw from. While I often create skies from my imagination, having my own reference photos is invaluable. These images keep me inspired and provide great starting points. Sky can do all sorts of crazy things that you wouldn't imagine, especially when you're thinking about the basic rules of how a sky works. The sky will often just completely break those and do something crazy and interesting, it's just a great idea to capture as much of this as you can whenever you're out and about because then you've got your own personal references that nobody else has. They're unique to you. They're original, pull your phone out, get a picture and keep them in a folder, and they're just such great starting points. I shared a folder of some of the pictures I've taken and you're welcome to use them for your own reference. Also encourage you to start your own collection, go through your existing photos or take new ones and save them in a dedicated folder. For this class, I recommend using a few reference pictures just to give you some ideas and some colors to pick from. They may spark some interesting cloud shapes or some arrangements that you really like. Yeah, I'd recommend for this course, just having a starting point, use my reference pictures or you can use some of your own. Remember, the goal is not to directly copy or trace your reference pictures, but to use them as starting points for inspiration. When you use them as starting points and draw them without directly copying them, you start to make marks that have your own twist or your own unique way of mark making. And that's really what brings your voice into an image and starts to build up your visual language. So I'd really recommend just using reference images as starting points rather than directly taking the exact shape from a cloud that you've seen so do download my reference images or gather your own and check your phone and computer, your photo libraries or search online and save a few skies that you like. Now I'm going to show you how I might use reference. So we're going to start a new file. Let's go with 1920 by 1080300 pixels per inch. That looks good. I just double click in this space to unlock the background layer, press okay. Now it's unlocked. Add a new layer, select both of them, and I'm going to hold Control and click in this space here. It's a new artboard from Layers. Now that's an artboard. Now I can add a new canvas to the side of it. If I click the text here, brings up these little pluses, I press plus here, we've got another one there. I'm going to file open, and I'm going to go to this is my texture library. I'm going to go to skies in sky reference collection. I think there was one up there that I liked number five before. I'm going to just drag these into Artboard two. That was 34. That one there. One way of using reference is just picking colors. I'll add a new layer and choose the color picker here. I'll just start picking some of the colors and using the brush to paint them on a new layer. We've got a yellow like that. Let's just make that full. We've got a yellow in there. We've got this nice orange. Backdrop of the sky, that color. Soften when you color pick from a reference picture, you wouldn't believe that looks like a yellowy brown. You'd never think the sky was that color, but it totally take you by surprise and then we've got those colors and then in the clouds, we've got these colors. Over here, we've got so softer colors and some of the other cloud colors. Then let's do one for this one, we've got a nice light blue. And we've got this darker blue from the clouds. Then we've got that nice pink. Then we've got that hot yellow there. Now that we've got a little color palette, we could start doing some loose sketches on our first artboard, Artboard one. I could just use some of these colors. I know that that's the background color just as this is just a study. Laying in some colors. We've got that color in the background. We've got some of this warmer color, bit lower down. Then we've got that pink further down, sorry, that orange further down. Then we've got that lovely bright sun. Then actually it's basically white in the middle, which we could do if we wanted. Then we can use that darlo dark cloud color for some of these clouds. Just look at some of the shapes. I'm just kind of thinking of trying to do a really quick study of what's going on in this reference picture. I'm just using the bracket keys to toggle the size of the brush and just helps me kind of draw a bit quicker without having to go all the way up here. Then there's nice warmer colors in the clouds as well. We can pick directly from the reference picture if we wanted and kind of give some of these clouds up here that highlight that it's got. And it's a little bit bluer in this area, isn't it? That's a bit more of that blue. This is just a quick way of kind of experimenting and just doing some kind of loose studies, really. I just recommend this just to kind of get warmed up. If you've got any reference pictures you like or any of the ones that I've sent that you found useful or you want to try this exercise out, I'm just going to do the horizon lung. I think that's quite nice. Let's just put that in this painting. A well done. I know. It's go really small. I just do that crane because it's quite nice. Something like that. But that's essentially the idea is just getting an idea for the colors really. I find this a really useful way to just do a really simple quick cloud study. It's a way of using reference to give your own spin on things. Should do that one below. There we got this blue color as our backdrop. We just pop that in. Paint that in. You should give this a go so you can paint along with me or just open up your own image that you like. I recommend using artboards as just a way to have those images off to the side. You can have them in the same document, but it can be nice to have them in a separate one. We put in some of that blue background. Then we want to do that cloud because we're going to paint the pink over the top of it, that color and there's quite a lot of it down the bottom. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's just an example. It's just getting warmed up really. Just painting in the shape. I'm not being very precious about it. I'm just looking at the reference image and looking back at my image. We could I add a bit more? We're going to paint the pink over the top, so not worrying too much about that, so we grab that pick and then it's on the left hand side of all of these clouds. So It's up there. There's a lot of it down there. And then we're going to use that much lighter color there, make the brush a bit smaller. And that's just kind of doing the edges of our highlights. It's quite nice and warm down there. And could even color pick again from the image itself. You don't need to click on the layer, you just press I and just select a color from anywhere, press B again for the brush. Then because these are a bit pinkier up here. Then I think we're happy with that as a kind of idea. Let's put in this green for the trees, just and just recognizing that there's a slightly lighter color in the sky right down the bottom. So let's just add that in as well. Great. There we go. That's the idea, just kind of taking inspiration from some pictures you've taken. Yeah, I'm just really encouraging you to get started on making a collection of your own images for reference and finding interesting and different things that the sky does. Yeah, join me in the next video where we'll be looking at materials and tools that we're going to be using in this course. Thanks. 8. Cloud Shapes: Hi, everyone. In this section, we're going to explore how to create interesting shapes for your clouds. Clouds are an essential part of your sky and getting interesting shapes in there can make all the difference. Let's dive in. In this section, we're going to go through and explore how to create interesting shapes for clouds in your illustrations. But generally, this is a principle that's really important throughout illustration and making artwork. For this, I'm just going to open a new document. I've just chosen to have 11920 by 1080, 300 pixels per inch, create and I've selected my ultimate sketch brush. So let's just firstly talk about cloud shapes and natural forms. So in a landscape, most natural forms will generally have a convex shape, which means they bulge upwards like this. And a concave shape looks like this. You see this one way less than a landscape and this one way more so this is important when we're making our clouds. So we tend to have these convex shapes combinations because the water, the gas is kind of pushing upwards into the atmosphere. It's rising up and bulging. So we'll have those kind of shapes. You'll also see this in mountains. You'll see it in trees. They tend to be combinations of these convex shapes. You'll see it in rocks. Pebbles, leaves, they all tend to curve upwards towards the sky and they're being pulled down by gravity. This is really handy when we're doing our illustration. We're going to look at shapes and look at what's interesting and what's not. Generally symmetrical shapes, that's draw with black. Say we had a shape like this. If it's completely symmetrical, it's less interesting than something that's more offset or more asymmetrical. So immediately that shape is more interesting or say we did a big one to start with. So rather than this repeating symmetrical shape, we want to find interesting ways to make shapes. So we're looking at this one option here, thinking how we can how we can make that a bit more interesting. We could have really flat, really wide, and then really small or start really big, start small, start big again. I mean, there's an infinite amount of ways you can make a shape more interesting. So why don't you give that go? Start with a simple shape. Start with just a classic dome and then see how you could make that more interesting. Maybe it's taller on one side, high, much less symmetrical. You might want to put a dip in that. So you can see that this is going to be a useful thing for when we're painting clouds. We don't want our clouds necessarily to there's drawing on the background layer again. We don't want our clouds to be super symmetrical and really obvious. One thing that's useful when you're painting a cloud, if you're finding that all your shapes look a bit semi, think about how once you've drawn them in, so you're drawing a sky, your bigger ones are up the top and your smaller ones in terms of height. Ones are down the bottom. You might want to think, what can I do to make this more interesting? Then I suggest just basically going back in and working. This one looks quite similar, so maybe this bit could be longer. This is just a sketch. This bit could be lower, maybe It doesn't finish like that. This one's a bit boring. We could make that more interesting by maybe making this a little bit less balanced. So we're kind of trying to off balance things and make them feel weightier at one end and lighter at another end. That'll give you shapes a more interesting feel especially when it comes to your clouds, these ones are quite semi, but we could break out, make it a bit taller on one end. And make it go really thin down another end. Same for this one, it's a little bit semi. Maybe if we added one point where it started to bulge. That would give us a more interesting shape. Same for this one, that's quite feeling shape or movement. We could make that less even. Same for this here maybe we just add something down here to make that shape feel a little less semi. And instantly, we're starting to get a more interesting sky. So it's just kind of thinking about how we're thinking, how can I make cloud shapes more unusual or unique things that are less kind of obvious. We don't want to see these really traditional cloud shapes. We want to see kind of things that are a little bit more unusual. They'll draw the eye more. You'll get a better result if you approach it in that way. Have a play around with that. In a new document, if you just start sketching in, you could start sketching in a sky remember you have big clouds are going to be at the top. The big ones near the top, you're going to have medium sized ones. Then as we get closer to the ground further away, the clouds tend to be smaller. Then think about how you can make some of those more interesting shapes. What can you do to add things to shapes? You can combine clouds like this. You can rub things out. Add new parts to them. But yeah, essentially thinking, is there anything I can do to make that shape more interesting? That's a really great way to approach painting the sky because it will give you more visually compelling stuff to look at because it will give you more visually compelling stuff to look at and your skies will be a little bit more unique and interesting. Have a play with that. Do some sketching. Because when we go on to making our class artwork, we're going to be sketching in a sky. We're going to be trying to make some interesting shapes we don't want to have really boring uniform shapes here. We want to give it some interesting intrigue. Yeah, you can sketch directly into this document, start making your artwork or your plan for the artwork for the sky. But I'd recommend drawing in some shapes and then returning to them and thinking, what could be done to make these shapes more interesting? How can I offset or add or subtract things to give them a more unique feel. Clouds tend to be flatter on the bottom and tend to bulge upwards. That's why I tend to draw them flat on the bottom. But when you get higher in the sky, that flatness is less visible because you're looking directly up at them, so you're seeing more of the shape. It doesn't have to be uniform. Clouds tend to stick together. You'll have one form and it will combine with another and so on. Try to avoid too many really straight lines. If you can break those by adding a cloud below, it's a useful way to remove too many straight lines from your work. So, yeah, have an experiment with that, and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching. 9. What Kind of Brushmarks?: Back. I just wanted to go into a little bit more detail about how I paint clouds and the brush marks that I use. I wanted to do a bit more of a demonstration of that so that you really get the idea. I've opened up this file called What brush marks, and I'm going to open up my tools, my brushes, and here in my sky brushes. Let's look at painting with watercolor clouds. Close. The kind of brush marks that I use, I tend to make my brush size small around 60, 60 is good, and I'll either work downwards or I'll work upwards, but I'm painting in curved convex shapes. I'll tend to do these kind of shapes and I'll build them up and I'll keep painting over. Filling in the middle bit is fine with me if it's all dark. I use the brush to draw over the same spot over and over again and refine that shape. I'll do it in that same direction as well, that curved direction. Let's look at how I do that. I'll curve the brush downwards in that convex shape and I'll keep painting and layering up the shape until it until it's all black. I'm always generally painting in black first and then I'll use color overlay afterwards. But yeah, I build up the shapes like that. I'll think to myself, I've got a big one there. We could go over a smaller one and then curve that down. Then we have a smaller one down there. Paint that in. I'm being quite loose, but I'm definitely going over and over on the same spots to really build up the weight of that shape. So let's do another one. Let's try another brush. How about cloudy block? So again, around 60, I sometimes vary the size. I'm basically kind of dabbing the canvas. So like that, if you saw them as separate brush marks, they'd be like that, but they're kind of over one another. And I'll change the size sometimes just to kind of sketch it out. And then paint in make my brush bigger. I'm not clicking, holding and then doing the whole shape in one, I'm releasing and then approaching it again, then thinking about where to start from. Maybe I'll start from here. Maybe I'll go with a smoother brush side, start from there. Increase the brush size. For me, it's a combination of choosing new starting spots and doing these convex shapes, these bulging shapes. And the same happens when it comes to painting in light into a cloud. I do exactly the same thing. I'll show you that now. For example, let's add a new layer there. Let's choose a blue. Let's use the paint bucket to let's double click here, color overlay. That's okay. Then control click in that space and stterize it, add a new layer, we'll hold option just above there. There's a video about how to make these clipping masks later in the course that you can control click in that space and release the clipping mask or create a clipping mask or select a slightly lighter blue. Then what we'll do is make the brush a bit bigger and we're just painting Imagining the sun's coming from this direction, painting softly. I'm holding the pen quite softly, but I'm also doing quite loose soft brush marks. It's just really lightly laying it on. I'm not being too hard or I'm not painting in really hard like that. I prefer to let the brush do a little bit of what it's good at with the opacity and the flow and everything and just let that play out. Let's hide those. Let's do another one. Let's try with TCC cloud painter. So on a new layer, let's just make sure we're painting in white or we can paint in black by itting that. But let's paint in white now because we are on a blue background. Again, starting with a small brush size, just imagining the shape of the cloud. I'm not always drawing out the whole shape of it first. I quite like to paint it as I go to get a feel for the shape and let it grow organically. I'm painting in changing the brush size. Using big brush marks to get some interesting things going on and smaller brush marks to fill in, go even smaller. Back to bigger. And constantly changing the brush size basically and being quite delicate with the painting of the cloud. Clouds themselves are quite delicate, so it's a comftnt person who can really just bang in a shape like that and fill it. I tend to find that I create shapes more organically as I go and this has served me well over the years. I'd recommend doing it in this way. As you go, you keep deciding whether or not that's an interesting shape. Right now, I'm like, well, that's actually quite a nice shape. Maybe I'll add something next to Change the brush size, go a bit smaller and improve the detail in some bits. And then for bigger clouds, say, for example, clouds up the top, I'll use a bigger brush, brush size. I'll use the bracket keys to just keep making that brush size bigger or you can do it up here, size, Tuggle there. Again, I'm being really loose. Just being extra soft up there. I'll probably change brush. Maybe let's go with watercolor. Let's go with this one, cumul nimbus. So you can have this search done. I believe that just helps with the pressure sensitivity. It's also something to consider how your Wacom tablet is set up. I tend to have mine at quite a sensitive setting, but some people prefer to have it so that you can push quite hard before a brush mark comes. It's totally your preference. That's mine. I've done it like that for many years. So just my reminder is doing brush marks quite light. Being quite soft with them. When it comes to the clouds, you really don't need to push too hard. Brilliant. This is just an example, document. This isn't a kind of complete sky here. Looking at bigger at the top. So I'd really encourage you to have a go at that. Open up this document, and why not just get painting in there? You can add a new layer at the bottom and make it a sky color. You could make it a gradient if you wanted. And then just paint on top with a new layer. Choose a brush. It could be one of my glove brushes. It could be another brush that you like. It could be one of my other brushes. These kind of painting brushes are quite nice. And you could get painting in there and just use really quite light brush marks. And remember, it's for me anyway, about these kind of bulges. So it's collecting interesting sequences of big one, then small one, then medium sized one, then lower one. And the next cloud, really big one, small one. It's that kind of combination. So have a go at painting some of those. Try out some different brushes that you like. If you do like them, and there's there's ones that you're really keen on, you could always reorganize them so you can in here if you control click and you got a new brush group, and you could say, My favorites, and then you can just drag brushes into the Actually, please. Yeah. Okay, great. I'll see you in the next video. 10. Values: Hi, everyone. In this video, we're going to dive into the concept of values and why they're so important when painting skies. We'll also do some simple value studies to practice what we've learned. Let's get started. Hi, welcome back. So in this video, we're going to look at values. So what are values in making art? What are values? Values are best understood as light or tone. When I read the word value, I think about how light or dark an object or color is. Values are crucial in creating artwork because they help establish depth, contrast, and mood. By using a range of values from light to dark, you can create a sense of distance and form, making your images more realistic and visually compelling. Are they important? Good value contrast ensures that the main elements of your composition can be clearly read, guiding the viewer's eye through the image to what's important. Understanding and applying values effectively is a great way to improve your image making. Breaking it down. You can mostly break down any scene into three value ranges. This is the simplest way to separate values. I like to do it as a light, mid and shadow values. Take a look at these examples. This is a famous painting by Cuspar David Friedrich here I've just done an example of separating that painting out into three value ranges. Here I've separated out another couple of images into three value ranges and you can see how simple they can be when they're separated and reduced down to those simple value ranges, but also how successful and how the image still reads. That's really important. When you're thinking about values, you're thinking about light and dark and contrast and what's going to be seen in the image. Thinking about an image in terms of just simply three different values is a really great way to make sure that your image reads well and that the most important aspects or action is going to be communicated to the viewer and their eye is going to be drawn directly in a landscape, we can separate it easily out into those three values, the light, mid and dark. But in a sky, we don't find that darkest value or very, very rarely. The value generally much lighter. Instead, I simplify a sky into three values with a very light value added and then I'll use that darkest value for anything in the landscape. Here on the right, I've just shown that the sky tends to have those three lighter values and the ground tends to use mid values to darker values. Now open up the document titled skies class value studies and have a go at painting a few value studies. I'll show you how to do it now and you can follow along with me or you can do your own ones. So I've opened up that document, skis class value studies, and we're going to just paint in some values here, just as a way to warm up and test out how to paint with values. There's a few reference pictures here. I've included a few others if you want to try some others, or you can add your own. But let's just go with these ones to start with, and then you can paint along. Let's use a brush. I'm going to go let's go with this cloud painter brush. For this mid part of the sky, I'm going to use this mid color just going to paint in really loosely. It doesn't matter if you go over the edges, we're just getting warmed up here. We just painting that color in and then we're going to use this darker color for those clouds. Even though it is actually technically a little bit lighter. I just want to use this as an example because I want to use the ground. I'm going to paint that in. I just use the eye tool, the eyedropper, select the color, press B back for brush, and we'll just pop in the shapes of the foreground. So we've got the trees from the I think that's a golf course. We'll just block all of that in. Then we're going to use that mid one for the clouds. Then I'm also going to use that mid one just to show that there's a bit more going on here in the foreground. Really, I'd want a slightly darker color there. But anyway, we're just separating it out into simple value separations. We use that lightest one, and we're just paint a bit where the clouds getting caught by the sun. It's all the way along there and then it's down here. Great. That's as simple as it needs to be. Now let's do the one below for this one. We're going to do the same, we'll paint the brush slightly bigger, we're painting the sky using that mid tone there. Then in the background. Then I'm going to just paint in that foreground the brush a bit smaller. Let's just have some doesn't need to be accurate, but we've just got a few houses here. And chimney coming off one of these and another one up there. That'll do for the detail of the houses. And just use this darker value here, just for some of the shadows and some of the clouds. And then that lightest value up there is most of the light is coming from the right hand side on this image. So the clouds that are being core by that. If we had more values in between here, if we added more variation, we could maybe do that gradient, but I want to keep it really simple here, just separating them out into really simple value ranges. I mean, we could do that with our mid one here if we wanted to give it a go. You can try and paint that in. Fade it out a little bit as it comes down. But yeah, keeping it really simple, we use some of that tone on the sky to soften up some of those bits. Yeah. I mean, that would do that. And if you want to try out the other ones, you're very welcome too. You just open up that and try out some others or try out some of your own. Yeah, that's the general idea. It's just basically thinking about the sky as different values and keeping it simple, a light, a medium, and a darker. Great. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. 11. Perspective: Hi, though. Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to quickly cover perspective in terms of cloud arrangement. I'm not going to look at all the rules of perspective because you could do a whole course on that and that's a massive topic. But here, there's just a few things that are important to know in terms of skies, and that's where we put our clouds in terms of perspective, as I think that's really just an important fundamental to get right early on. So if you open up this document, perspective Cloud arrangement, you'll see in there that we've got this shape layer, which is this much bigger star shape. I've got a whole YouTube video about how to create these, but basically you use the polygon shape tool with this setting set to 100 and you go 1% there and from center and copy these settings with fill as black and that a shape. And when you click and drag, you'll create a star. We've got one already, so let's just use that. This gives us an indication of perspective. If that's the vanishing point right in the middle, then all the perspective lines lead towards that, and the I is looking towards there. I've pressed Command T, or you can go edit, transform path, scale, we're just going to move that down just so that it's near the bottom, press Enter. Now we click on this other layer. So I like to have my perspective star on 40%, and I'll lock it. And then here I just want to grab a brush. Brush will do and from the middle, I'm just going to click and hold shift and draw in a horizon line. There we go. We've got our horizon line. Now we can imagine, for example, if that was the sea, there are some mountains here, some rocks here, the cliff edge in our image that we're going to be making later and some more here, then you can imagine this as the sea and the horizon line. In terms of clouds, close to the horizon and close to the center of the perspective star, the furthest away we're going to be. As a result, our clouds are going to get squashed by perspective. We can draw them in flat. The height of them is going to be very low kind of following loosely, I don't follow these too strictly, but following those perspective lines as a guide to the direction, the height of our clouds. So they'll still appear flat at the bottom. But as they kind of come closer to us foreshortening, we'll start to see them following these perspective lines a little bit more. You can plot different shapes on there. They're still remaining to have flat bottoms. But they have a slight indication towards the direction of the perspective lines. So you'll see as we start painting them in, it'll feel like that's in the distance, they're in the distance. And as we get closer to the sun, they're smaller or to the vanishing point, they're smaller. And then as we're further away, our clouds are bigger, and they tend to follow the perspective lines even more. So you might see one like that. These ones in the middle, their bottoms tend to be less flat the closer they are to you and you can use those perspective lines to guide your shape. Let's just made it a little bit different, a bit more interesting. Then following the perspective lines again, and then these ones at the top, because they're essentially much closer to us directly above us, they will be bigger by quite considerable amount and also follow the perspective lines even more. They're more affected by that perspective. You see, without the star, you wouldn't necessarily know that I was drawing following those lines. But when you see them in, you can see that the direction of some of the way that these clouds come into the scene and leave the scene, it's always in the direction of that perspective. And then it's always nice to cross these lines with something like a plane, the trail of a plane or something, have your birds in there. We're using a perspective star to give us an indication of the direction that our clouds are going to lead us. As a result, when you're looking at this image, you're naturally feeling like the direction of your eye, these clouds here, they're leading us this way. These ones down here, they're leading us this way. These ones here, they're leading us in. These ones, they're all leading us to the vanishing point, which we're figuring out is somewhere here. Have a go at that yourself and open up this document perspective cloud arrangement, and have my perspective star in, drag it down, put in a horizon line, and then use that perspective star to draw some clouds that are not exactly you don't want to have straight lines like this following the perspective star, but go for wobbly lines that really loosely are guided by the direction of the star. Then when you get more proficient at this, you'll start learning that you can unlock that start, you could move it in a direction and then lock that star again with a new layer, but in a new horizon line and have an alternative vanishing points. The middle is quite obvious, so it's quite nice to offset it. But your clouds would then all be facing this direction. Doing this one very quickly just as an example. But you see that when you move that perspective star, it gives you new opportunities with the sky to tell a story with the clouds about where we're looking as viewers. Great. Have a play around with that and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. 12. The Rules and Breaking Them: While it's essential to understand the fundamentals that make a compelling image, it's equally important to know that rules are not everything. Sometimes breaking them can make your artwork even better. Let's take a look. Hi, welcome back. In this video, we're going to quickly touch on the basic rules for painting a sky. Firstly, we use gradients for the atmosphere. Skies typically have a smooth transition of color in the atmosphere from light near the horizon to darker at the top. We can achieve this by painting with soft brushes and using multiple layers and we learn how to do this in the gradients lesson. Power placement, we typically see big clouds at the top of an image as they're closer to us, mid sized clouds in the middle of the sky and smaller wide not tall cloud shapes near the horizon. This arrangement helps us understand perspective and creates depth. Then our light source, the sun or moon is usually the primary light source in the sky, where it is important as it illuminates the clouds and the scene below, depending on the placement, we can create different moods for the viewer to experience. Values. We looked at this in our values lesson. The sky has the lightest values in the scene. Generally, the dark values are still lighter than the values in the landscape. And atmospheric perspective. The further away an object or cloud is in the sky, the lighter and more muted its colors become though this is not always true for sunsets and sunrises and the detail also reduces with distance. That's some of the basic rules and fundamentals that we've covered in this course. Now let's look at a few cases where you can break those rules. Breaking the rules for impact, breaking the rules can often enhance your image and make it more engaging. So let's look at a few examples. Lighting clouds unconventionally. If it helps your image to light up a cloud in a certain way, go for it. Don't worry if it doesn't make scientific or literal sense. If it makes the image more compelling and draws the viewer into your story, then it's worth breaking the rule. Using darker values. Sometimes you might need to make an area of the sky much darker in value than it would be in reality and that's perfectly fine. Adjusting values can help you highlight specific parts of your illustration and create the desired mood. Cheating perspective with cloud placement, you might want to cheat perspective to draw the viewers attention to a particular element. It's okay to bend the rules of perspective if it serves the overall composition and narrative. I often break the rule of small clouds in the distance, big ones overhead when I feel it works better visually. Lighting clouds from multiple directions. Sometimes you might want to Lighting clouds from multiple directions. Sometimes you might want clouds to be lit up from multiple directions, and this can add an interesting dynamic to your image. And if it works visually and enhances the magic in your sky, then go for it. And clouds with even or symmetrical shapes. While even shapes are generally more interesting, sometimes an even or symmetrical shape is exactly what you need for your composition. Can create balance and harmony in the right context, don't treat this as a hard and fast rule. The rules we've covered are guidelines to help you construct an image, not to hold you back or constrain your illustrations. Feel free to experiment and see what works best for you. Knowing the rules gives you a foundation, but breaking them can lead to new and exciting results. Your perspective and your choices are what makes your artwork unique to you. Great. Join me in the next video. I'll see you there. 13. Class Project: Painting The Gradient: Hi there. Welcome back. In this video, we're going to look at painting in the atmosphere but painting in a gradient. If you open up the document titled Atmosphere Template Doc, it will be in the class resources. This one here, we've got that open already. I'll show you how I do it. You've loaded in my brushes already. If we go on tools here, we've got brush, sky brushes, and then I use this sky Base Builder or this sky atmosphere brush. You can use either one or a combination of both is quite nice. Let's start with the sky base Builder. So what I do is I add a new layer. So we've got a new layer there. And then our first off, fill that with the paint bucket tool, which is just here. Sometimes it will have the gradient tool, you can lay in a gradient in a photoshop way, but I prefer to do it in a hand drawn way. Let's take the paint bucket and we'll go for a mid blue somewhere here. I tend to use blues or generally all colors are not super high on the saturation for skies. I tend to go around here. So there and then we just click to fill. We've got our base color. Then if we want to adjust that, we can adjust that. We can change the color here so let's go a little bit lighter. Great. We add a new layer by clipping down there in the bottom corner, and then we go back to our brush. Pictures here, sky Base builder, and it's a bit big at this point, so we're just going to make it a bit smaller by toggling the brush size, you can do that here. I use keys, the little bracket keys to do this. Yet that's the way to do it. I'm going to just make it a bit bigger with the bracket keys. Then I'll select a color that's a bit lighter than this if we're just going to do a blue sky and paint in the layer, then we paint in all the way across and then we'll select a color that's lighter than that and go a bit lower then a new layer and a color that's even lighter than that now, just for the bottom. Then if we come back here, so we'll select that top color, we could go a little bit darker. Then we can add a new layer and we're going to add a bit more saturation here right up the top. The bigger you make this brush, the better really. You'll get a better gradient. Then I do a little bit of reducing the opacity of each layer just so that the gradient feels a little bit more natural. So just dropping things down to 75 ish or 65. And then I've got a kind of great starting point of a gradient to work from. And you can see it's kind of got a little bit of a hand drawn field. Doesn't feel too computery. Let's have a look at that. Let's delete those and then do a sunset. So let's go with a lighter blue. A lighter blue to start with. We just use the paint bucket to give us our background layer. Then let's use the other brush, the atmosphere brush. Going to go with an orange somewhere around here and we'll put that across all the way across and paint it in. Then we're going to do a lighter yellow, select a lighter color on a new layer down the bottom. Then here further above, we're going to have a look at that blue, so I just press I for the eyedropper, select the blue, this kind of blue. Again, we can go a bit bigger, the brush, paint the cross. And add a new layer, go a little bit darker. Paint across. Now you might want to move the layers around a little bit. I'm going to move this orange down a tiny bit. Move the yellow down. You can't move them up. I'll just show you why. Say you move the yellow up, you'll see it finishes there. It's got the lines main for the orange. You can move them down. Let's move the orange down. And the yellow down. I just do that by pressal command teeth, which is the transform. You can come here and press transform to move it or you can just use the arrow key, the move tool here. I have got into a habit of using transform just so that I can see a box around it. I've moved it down because I feel like in the middle I could blend those two colors a little bit better. Let's just hide the yellow. Select the orange and then we're going to go for something. Blues up there and to get there, you don't want to go past green and you want to go round this way. We go for a slightly pinkier color with the brush still quite big. I'll lay the color in there, turn the yellow back on. Now I'll just reduce the opacity a little bit on some of these so that blue in the background is showing through a little bit. And then we've got a great starting point, gradient to take us to the next stage painting the clouds and everything. You can change the color of the background or any of these by Ipress Command U. Adjustments There we go. Image adjustments. I usually use the hot keys, so I'm not used to finding these. Hue and saturation, you can just tinker with that. Sometimes you want to make it a little bit more on the purply side of things. Is it fits in a bit better, you can increase the brightness. But, yeah, I think just ever so slightly like that. That's where acting nicely. So another document now we'll look at opening up the final artwork document. So if we open this document that I've provided for you, and then we can start laying in our background atmosphere. So now that we know how to do that, we've added a new layer. Let's go with the blue. So something like this, neutral blue. We're going to use the paint bucket tool, press fill, and we want a new layer. We're going to go back to our brushes, atmosphere brush or the sky base builder, but I use this atmosphere a bit more regularly, we're going to get a nice orange and we're going to paint that in, back and forth a little bit, we're going to do a yellow down the bottom. You got to go back and forth a few times to get this one to lay down the stronger colors and then up here, we'll go for a nice pinky color. Just using the opacity change at the end is one of the things that gets these colors to blend nicely. I'll add the darker blue, I've used the tal to select the eyedropper to select the color in the background. I'm just going to go for something slightly darker. For the higher reaches of the sky, I tend to increase the brush size a little bit. Yeah, it's just like that. Add a new layer. We'll go quite a bit darker now. I can decrease a little bit, move it down, and just in the top corners. We've painted in a gradient that's handmade and feels a little bit more unique than just a photo shot gradient. So then move some of these layers down a little bit or kind of play with their positioning. That's quite a lot of orange or yellow. You can also sometimes I do this, I'll duplicate a layer. So I do that by holding t and dragging it down so that you get that blue line across or you can press control on the layer and press duplicate layer. And then I'll knock them both down to 50% and I'll move one of them further down, maybe you can move one of them up a tad just to increase the smoothness of the gradient. Then we'll maybe move this yellow poking in. Move that pink down. And then you can just decrease the opacity of some of these a little bit. They've already had their opacity decreased, but that one could probably go a bit further. It's a nice subtle gradient, this one, then we can change the background color by pressing Command U. Change how that feels. We can do this to any of those layers, but background one has quite a lot of impact because it does shine through the other layers when they are a bit opaque. So let's increase the brightness a tiny bit. Or we can go more. But, I feel like that's working nicely. Nice glowing sunset. Then I tend to put these in a group, so I just highlight them all by holding shift. Press Command G or you can right click and you can say new group from layers. The little boxes popped up on my laptop, but here it is. We can call that sky gradient. We've got it. Great. Join me in the next video. I'll see you there. 14. Clipping Masks: Everyone, welcome back to the class. In this quick tutorial, we're going to learn about a powerful tool in your digital art arsenal clipping masks. Clipping masks are a great way to control where your colors, textures, and effects go without affecting the entire layer. Let's dive in and see how they work. Hi there. Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about clipping masks. These are something that I use all the time in my work, all my documents, all my jobs. I'm constantly using clipping masks because they're really useful way of painting a shape and then painting another color on top of that shape without it going over the edges of the shape below. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to add a new layer here. It's going to be really useful when we're painting our clouds. I'll select a brush, cloud painter brush. I've got a black color here. I'm just going to paint in a shape just to show you as an example. I'm going to paint in a square. Now, we'll call that square. Now, I add a new layer on top of this one and then I can press Control click in this space here and click here, Create Clipping mask, you'll see that that layer now is slightly indented and it have that little arrow pointing down, so it's clipped to the one below. Now if I chose a different color, a yellow, I could paint over the edge. And it'll always just be painting inside that layer. That information is still there. So if I control click again here and I release the clipping mask, you'll see that that paint mark has been painted, but it's just being clipped to this layer. So create clipping mask. You can use this to paint on shapes, change the color. Do all sorts like this, and it's such a handy thing to be able to draw one object and then draw just within the boundary of that object. So this is going to be super useful when we paint our skies. If you hold the option key, you hover over the kind of border between the two layers, you'll see that says release clipping mask. So I've released it, so I've got that layer and that layer separated. Or I can hold option and click there again, and then it puts the clipping mask back on. So when it comes to something like painting a cloud, for example, say we chose this dark color up here, add a new layer, let's just put in a really simple shape. Say this was our cloud. We'll just fill that. Well tool that layer cloud, add a new layer, press control there, create clipping mask. Then we could select a color from lower down as a highlight, and we can paint in that highlight into this shape. And we can even choose another color and put it below that so we can add more. If you've got the selection on that top layer, when you press new layer, it will just become a new layer that's not a clipping mask so you'll have to add that to the clipping mask. Now the new layer is over the old layer, so you can drag these around within the clipping mask. Say we chose a pinky color, you could paint underneath You can paint lots of different colors within a shape. This is super useful, especially when doing skies. I'll always use clipping masks for things like the highlights and adding layers to cloud. Yeah, have a little practice with that. And yeah, I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. 15. Class Project: Sketch: Hi, welcome back. In this video, we're going to get started on drawing the clouds in. The first thing I'm going to do is open up a reference picture. I'm going to highlight those and Control click in the space there and do artboard from layers. Press Okay, so we've got an artboard there and then I'm going to open up a new one by clicking the plus in there, I'm going to go to File Open, and I'm going to open up reference picture number five, the one that I liked. I'm going to drag that into here. Now we've got that there as reference and we can just quickly select the colors again just to have them as little swatches if we need them. The colors that we're going to paint in might change, but it's good to have I've pulled them out. Those are the kind of colors. So they're slightly different to our atmosphere colors, but that's fine. So let's go back to Artboard one, and we've got our sky grading that we did before. We've got the foreground stuff that I have pre down for you guys. So if you add a new layer here and select a brush, if you go to TCC sketching brushes. Let's go just with that one and I'm going to start drawing some clouds in and just using that as a reminder. I like to have the perspective star on just so that I know where everything is. Our suns going to be somewhere in there. Then sorry, I've got a bit of a sore throat today. Then we're just going to sketch in some of these shapes. Some of those worked really nicely in that reference image. I'm just going to see if I can do something similar. And we can improve these shapes as we go. Doing a loose sketch here for now. So there's some softer clouds up the top. Then they fade off on this side. They're thinner. Then there's a nice long one there, this one here, which we'll do pop in here. Something like that could be nice. My preferences on this image is not to completely cover the top, so I'm going to rub out a little bit here and I'm going to finish this cloud around here, maybe a bit more like that. Then we can have some separated shapes up there too. But something like that starts to feel quite nice. There's some really nice clouds down there that are just crossing over this space. Using the perspective lines, you can base clouds on them. Base shapes lead in the direction ever so slightly of the perspective lines. So yeah, I'm happy with this. This is going to be a bit bigger. Maybe we'll have a few lower ones, but it's quite nice if they're mainly on the right hand side. Yeah. So, yeah, I think I'm happy with that. I mean, you could come in and refine some of these shapes, make them a little bit more interesting in the way that we talked about before, just trying to remember to make them uneven, not too symmetrical. Some of these are a little bit boring. So when it comes to it, I might make them thinner and then thicker or, you know, do something a little bit less symmetrical, add bits to clouds. Yeah, I'm generally happy with that. If you are two, then what we can do is we can put that on a low opacity, maybe 15, and I'll just lock it by pressing the little lock and then turn off the perspective star and we'll use that as a guide to drawing the clouds in. Great. I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. 16. Class Project: Painting in the clouds: There, welcome back. So in this video, we're going to paint in the clouds. That's one of the finest parts. And we just stated the linework as a kind of loose guide. We've got our layer there of linework. I mean, you can label that linework if you want. I'm going to add a new layer below, and then we're going to start painting. So I zoom in a little bit, and I'm going to select this brush, not sketching brushes, but sky brushes. I'm going to do cloud painter then I'm going to start painting them in. I paint them all in black. This is just so that I can see them. I mean, you can turn off the background so that you can see them with a little bit clearer. I tend to keep it on. I just paint it in black and then I can change the color after. So in this stage, I'm just painting in these shapes. I'll change the brush size quite regularly, constantly going from small back up to big. I think often doing bigger sizes and you feel comfortable with is often actually quite a good idea. Someone once told me that you should always paint with a bigger brush than you're comfortable with and a much smaller brush than you'd normally choose because those big marks mixed with the small marks make a more interesting or give a more interesting result. It's a bit of a lengthy process, and it usually takes me a little while. I might speed up some of the footage of me painting these in. But yeah, if you just paint along and you can just paint clouds or painting that kind of single color into the image following your day. And you can deviate from your shape if you like. I sometimes I'll add bulges here or rub away bits. Yeah, you're just using it as a guide. Making it much smaller brush size down towards the end where clouds in and then much bigger. Those bits. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can rub things out, and it's just getting it down on paper. Ogi I often rotate the canvas as I draw, but I know that's going to be a bit distracting for you to watch, so I'll normally be drawing like this, and then I rotate again and then rotate, and then I just find it means I can keep a nice angle on my arm. For these videos, I'm going to keep it straight on so that it's easier to watch. Just throwing all these clouds in. What we might do at the end is separate some of them out. The lower down ones will give one color and then we'll choose the higher clouds and we'll give them a different color just because they'll be affected by the light source a bit differently. So you can be quite expressive with this. I tend to go for big brush sizes and just big strokes. I don't worry about keeping to the line exactly. I'm more interested in trying to get a kind of interesting shape. Having a slightly expressive, more painterly line is absolutely fine in my book. As long as I've got something that's quite interesting to look at, it doesn't matter if it looks less refined. And naturally, because you're looking up at these clouds and they're closer to you, these ones will be the ones a little bit more broken anyway. It's the clouds that are right at the bottom, the furthest clouds away that will have the sharpest shape. Yeah. For these lower bits, I'm using a much smaller brush size that's just made the brush quite considerably smaller. I'm just trying to make the edges ease out so that it's not too thick at the end of each cloud clouds tend to bulge and be wispier right at the edges. Just trying to recreate that with the brush size. I find that gives a more convincing feel. This is all a bit too rough. I'm just going to use a smaller brush size just to it up and same down there. It's fine for me being that loose near the top, but down the bottom, I'm quite strict with myself. I quite like to make the shape, communicate quite clearly, and be quite consistent, not too obviously a photoshop brush. Now, I'm also going to just show you I'm going to try painting with this TCC, big clouds at the top. It's just slightly more soft on the edges, so just allows the tops of those clouds just to have a little bit of softness. I wouldn't use this down at the bottom, but it's quite nice to vary the brush up a little bit. It can feel a little bit boring if you're just using one brush the whole time. I'd really recommend having a few that you go to keeps things interesting for you, keeps things fun for the viewer. All of this by a bit. Imagining seeing through the cloud a little bit more, seeing the colors below. And being really loose with it's not to be perfect here. As long as you've got a nice tress and shake. Make that brush smaller or bigger. Yeah. Let's put in tiny bit there. Great. Okay, I'm happy with that. What we're going to do now is we are going to separate them out a little bit. I'm I use this lasso select tool. I just draw with the lasso tool, I'm going to select these top clouds. So we selected that. Now, I usually use the shortcut for this, but if you go to new layer via cut, that just cuts that bit. Then you've got those bottom ones there, then we'll do it again. We've got the assu again and we'll just take this one. The ones that were up there. And those and that one. I'm going to keep those bottom ones separate. Again, layer up new layer via cut. We've got our three different sections cloud middle and the bottom. The bottom ones, what I'm going to do to color these, I click in the area to the right of the text, this big area, if you double click on it, you'll bring up a layer style box, which this is how I do all my coloring. I'll select a color overlay. Which basically means that all of the pixels that you've just drawn in that layer will be able to be colored as one color. So you can select maybe you can select one of the colors that we had before or I might select one of those colors from there. When you drag onto the image, it will just give you this little eyedropper so you can select from your reference picture if you like. Okay. You'll see that you can turn that on or off. I like to have it. On. Then I will often if you control and click in that space, you can rasterize the layer style, and that just means that it's permanently no that color. You can't turn it on or off anymore. We'll do the same for this one, so it's just double clicking there. And let's go with more of a blue, might even adjust it slightly here. That's okay. Then we rasterize that and same for the top one. That color is quite nice, but maybe we will maybe we'll go a little bit lighter. I think it needs a bit more blue in it. But now that we're looking at this reference picture, we can change our sky gradient. We can press on this one, we can press Command U, bring up the hue and saturation box. Let's just lighten that up a little bit. I feel like we could make those pinks more orange. So just double click on the color overlay. Just change that to a bit more orange. Same with that one, we'll click there. We'll just go a little bit more orange. And these colors at the top are a little bit dark. So let's just reduce the opacity a little bit. Great. And then now we can close up that group, and I think we can make those top clouds a little bit lighter, go a little bit bluer. Yeah. Why up. We'll rasterize that. Great. Now let's put in our light source. We've got our clouds, we've got our sky gradient. Let's put in the new layer and we could use this brush. I'm going to use the cloud painter brush again. I'm going to start with white just so that I can see it. Put in a circle there, turn off our line work just so we can see what's going on. Might want to zoom in a little bit. Have a tendency to do things from zoomed out or really zoom in and make everything very detailed, I'm very guilty of. So, yeah, that's cool. And then behind that, we'll put a new layer, and let's go with, why not the atmosphere brush. Make it much smaller. Let's select a nice bright yellow and just put that behind. What I might do is I might duplicate this. Do you remember if we call that sun, if I hold option and drag down below it, I'll have another one. If I put them both on 50%, 50%. One on top, a bit smaller. Move it into the middle. Just a little bit of variation there. I could do that again. I figure behind it and just gives the sun a little bit more. It's less of a sharp shape. Great. Join me in the next video where I'll be talking about adding highlights. 17. Class Project: Painting Highlights: Welcome back, everybody. In this video, we're going to be adding the highlights to our image. What I want you to do is we've got our sun there. We can select those. That's the gradient behind it. Yeah, select all four of those and just put them in a group by pressing Command G. Control click on PC, it might be right click and new group from layers. Call that sun, Rotten clouds here. I'm just going to name these layers clouds. We're going to add a new layer, and we're going to do what we did earlier. We're going to make a clipping mask. So we're going to control. We're going to create clipping mask. Now we're going to select a nice warm orange or we can select directly from our reference picture, and I've got the atmosphere brush there, but I'm going to go back to the cloud painter brush and zoom in. Now, all the way along the bottom of this cloud, especially where the sun's catching it. I just paint in nice warm highlight. And you could add a little bit on the bits where it's clearly going to be visible. You can't even bring some of those in and add a bit of depth to your cloud. There'll be some there, there'll be some there. Some there. Change the size of this brush. Doesn't have to remain the same size the whole time, then these next ones. Painting along the bottom, especially near and close to the sun, it's basically all going to be orange. So we were quite a small brush. We're just painting alone, painting in those highlights. Great. Not super happy with that one there or necessarily that one I feel like could probably do better there. This one up there that I miss. Just being aware of where the sun is. So we'll do the same for the next layer up. We can use the same color. We can just make it a little bit less more opaque if we want to reduce the strength of it. But paint in nice highlight. Underneath all these clouds. Just remembering that it's probably the bottom or the bits that are exposed underneath that are going to catch the sunlight. We're thinking about with our perspective star, where's it going to go? It's going to hit. These are the rays. It's going to hit all of these bits. I might hit just up there. Gonna hit that. It's gonna hit there. So down here. You get most of it on this side a little bit underneath. And mostly there. We didn't do this one, did we? Great. Looking good. And now we do the same for this last one up here. Make the brush tiny bit bigger. C even reduce the flow a little bit. Doing highlights all the way along the bottom. Just being aware of where the sun is. Just painting it in lightly. Brilliant. Really there. See, some of these bits we can do, but I'm trying to think of not going up into there, because I feel like the big cloud blocking it. We're trying to be aware of where the sun is, where the sun's touching the cloud, where the lights catching it. It's all these underside parts. Right? We can make the brush bigger because this bit is bigger, softer. Really soft. You can even make it a bit more opaque. And let's make it a tiny bit more opaque still and keep it big. Then we'll just paint really lightly, so it feels like that warmth is bleeding into the cloud a little bit. Lighting up more than just the edge. Lovely. Great. Turn off the perspective star. So this is looking great already, and I think just a few kind of finishing touches now. So on this layer, I feel like we could also paint in with a little bit of our opaque brush just to make it feel like that warmth is bleeding in on some of these bits, especially where it's closer to the sun. Great. Then I think we should also on the lower clouds, we should select a yellow because we can add a new layer, we can control click and create clipping mask and we'll make the brush much smaller. We're just for the bottoms of these. We want to put the opacity back up and the flow back up, we can paint it now and see it. See that yellow. There it feels like where we're close to the sun, we're really getting hot highlights that sells in the proximity to the sound of these clouds. Useful way to do it. Great. Now what I'm going to do is on a layer above the sun with that same yellow. I just want to paint a few lines across the sun. I often do this just to help it feel like sun's set back a little bit behind clouds are so lit up that you can't even really see them. Yeah, that can help make it feel a bit more real that we could do with a new layer with an orange that was maybe a little bit lighter. We could do remember we're painting behind these clouds so we could just do some bake leaves m ins. And we reduce the opacity on those? Great. Okay. And now I feel like on this cloud, we just want to make it a little bit warmer. Let's go with the orange again. Still got the orange. We've got our brush. Let's just put it on at low opacity and we've got a new layer, adding a little bit of warmth down the bottom of that cloud. Reduce the quasity. Then one thing that I like to do is over the top of all of these clouds, take a new layer and maybe select a color like this, one of the colors from our image, and just paint in some really loose shapes. I'll zoom in a little bit, you can see. But I just like to paint shapes over the top of some of these shapes just so that these shapes don't feel like they're too flat and they're cardboard pieces increase opacity. So they're not feeling like they're kind of flat card body cut out, but that the sky's got a bit of depth and there's things that overlap, you know, I just helps sell it in, I think. It's adding layers and adding that sense of depth. There's a lot going on, and there's clouds at all sorts of different levels over the top of there. And we could do a few bigger ones. We can change the color of this if this isn't working. So why don't we go on color overlay? We can try different things. A nice blue might be nice. Something usually a bit different to the other clouds. Usually what I'll go for. Then here, why don't we use a pink, slightly more orangy pink with smaller brush size, but just to catch the edges of these. That wasn't really that pink, was it? Let's go there. There we go. Flipped them around. Just adding a bit of depth. We're just painting the edges of these just where the sun might catch them. This technique is just adding some more colors into our sky, we're not super uniform. You can just have a few of those dotted around that are not actually attached to any clouds, but just adding a little bit more information to the sky. Sometimes connected to some of your clouds. Sometimes breaking those shapes a little bit. Great. Okay, so I feel like that's getting there. That's looking good. And yeah, if you join me in the next video, adding some details. 18. Class Project: Adding Details: So hi there. Welcome back to this course, and we're nearly there with the sky. We are basically adding some finer details to help sell it in. I've added a new layer. We're going to go to brushes, and in this sky brush pack, we've got different birds that I've created. So if you want to see them, let's put them on paint in black. This first one it's quite nice. I'm going to base these birds flying over the scene. Then we go back. We could use these ones. Birds tiny to just add a few birds in there, maybe some in here around this rock, and then maybe we'll just do this bird's lots as well. Add some there. Cup. Okay. So we've got some birds in there. Let's change the color by double clicking there. We'll go color overlay. And yeah, let's go with a nice blue. And then another thing I'm going to do is just I want to add a plane in there. So I'm going to just draw this in. So in this, I've left this space here and we're going to just go with white, draw a line across, then just after the line, just drop in. Thank you. I And then I'm going to use my eraser. It's a big soft eraser just to rub out some of the back so that it's fading out. I might press command deep that a little. I'm going to use color overlay and we'll put that in a nice yellow. And maybe it will make that smaller person command T and reduce the opacity a little bit, so it feels like it's further away. We can move that around depending on where we want it. Yes, unhappy with it somewhere like that. Great. That's those details added. I'm also going to this hill in the distance. It's part of the foreground. But I just want to show you something. This distant cliff, one thing we can do, I'm just going to unlock this group. It distant cliff because I've changed the color of the atmosphere before. If I double clip here, go on color overlay, and then I select the color that's directly behind it, the color of the atmosphere, and I press Okay. And then if I reduce the opacity of that color, you'll see that that's the original color and that's the new color. Somewhere in between. The point at which the atmosphere starts affecting the color and it feels a little bit more like it's part of that world. This is a really useful technique for distant mountains. Use it all the time, and it's atmospheric perspective at work, really. I'd highly recommend just doing that. You put it on. You could have it a little bit less. I think 30 is probably good. Just helps sell in that hill a little bit more, makes it feel like it's part of the same world. Great. That's the details added. Now let's look at adding some adjustment layers. 19. Class Project: Adjustment Layers: Everyone, we're almost at the finish line, but before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about one last step that I usually give to my images that give them that final polish and that's adjustment layers. These are really fun and powerful tools that can help you unify your colors, tweak your tones, and make your artwork pop. So now we're basically finished with the artwork. We're just going to add some adjustment layers. Above here. I'm going to dilute that and I'm going to add an adjustment layer. I usually do it down here. There's a little round thing there where you can add an adjustment layer. You can also find them here, new adjustment layer and there's your selection of them there. I usually use color balance first. I always use a few adjustment layers. But I'll often use color balance first because I feel like it gives you a chance to see the images different possibilities more easily. I usually will not really tinker with the middle one too much, but I'll just increase the mid tones on the blue and sometimes push it either to cyan or to red depending on how the image is feeling. I'm going to just go a little bit red, and then we're going to go for highlights. I like to push the yellow up on the highlights just ever so slightly. Push the red up to get more of a warm feeling cool it down. You can use this one. I just tend to leave this one maybe ever so slightly tweaked. Yeah, that's feeling nice. Then we go to shadows, increase the blue shadows and maybe make them a little bit more sound. Great. Now, another one that I use. We can do it down there, or we can do it up here, New adjustment layer is levels. Your levels, I'll usually just tweak. I'll bring the light colors up. I'll bring the dark colors in. And then with this one, depending on what the image needs, you can either lighten up the mid range or darken the mid range. I'll just push it ever so slightly. For this one. Then the next thing I'm going to do adjustment layer is hue and saturation. That's okay. Now we can just tinker with that. Usually, just putting it onto minus three or four or something and reduce the saturation or increase depending on how you're feeling, I'll usually increase a tiny bit and just touch the brightness up by one or two, that gives me something that I'm pleased with. Then there is another one that I can show you that's really useful if you go to layer adjustment layer and gradient map. Okay. So we've laid a gradient over there. You see it's back to front here. So if we drag the black to that side and the white to that side, you see that we've got a gradient there laid over. What you could do is if you click on this space where there isn't the color, you can add a new color so you can click on the color thing. You could add a nice blue, add another blue, go much lighter. Go for an orange. Maybe in a lighter yellow. Now I can move those around a bit. They could add in a darker red here, pinkier red. I could lighten that blue up a little bit. I could lighten that orange up a bit. Darker lightening this color will help. And then you could play around just going through these different layer styles, seeing what that does to your image. So often you'll get some interesting results from that. One thing that I really like to do. Soft light and overlay are usually two of my favorites. I might use soft light in this case. So I'll just toggle that on and off so you can see what it's doing. It's just pumping up the colors a little bit. Maybe it's a little bit much, so I'll just put it on a lower opacity. Now, one thing that I just want to tweak on this image, I just want to go back to these clouds and I'm just going to change the hue and saturation ever so slightly. So it's a little bit lighter and just so that sky feels a little bit less extreme. Go for a bit more saturation there. No Go back to that one. A little bit lighter. This one, maybe a tiny bit darker than it was actually. Brilliant. Well, I'm happy with that that's worked nicely. I hope you found that really useful. I'd say that image is done, then go to basically hide this artboard, or you can control click and just delete the artboard and you can ungroup the artboard. Then if you hit save file save as, I usually save out a JPEG. Save a Jeg there. Make sure it's on 12. And yeah, it's saved. One little trick that I often do, so I'll open the JPEG, and then I'll just go on filter, sharpen smart sharpen. I just want it to be probably around 85, ten, one and that's just kind of sharpened up the image a little bit. So when you're looking at it on a computer, it feels kind of quite crisp. And maybe that saturation level is a little bit high, so I can just reduce it ever so slightly. Down to five maybe. Brilliant. So I hit Save and that's it. You're done. Thanks for watching. Yeah, I'll see you in the next video. 20. You're Done! : That's it. Thanks so much for joining me in this class. I hope you enjoyed creating your sky and picked up some useful tips along the way. I'm really excited to see how your projects turned out, so please don't hesitate to share your work in the gallery space. Seeing what you create is one of the best parts of teaching. If you enjoyed this class and want to stay connected, please feel free to check out more of my work on my website, Behance or Instagram. The links are just below. I've got more classes in the pipeline and I can't wait to share them with you. Thanks again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next class.