🔥
3d • 📸 Reference Library
☁️ Painting Clouds: Beyond Fluffy
Whether you paint digitally or traditionally, clouds follow the same principles: form, light, value, and atmosphere. The tools may be different, but the fundamentals don’t change.
A few things to be conscious of:
☁️ Start with the big shapes.
Don’t paint every puff individually. Squint at your reference and look for the overall silhouette first. Think about sculpting one large form before carving out the details.
☀️ Choose your light source first.
Clouds don’t glow everywhere equally. Decide where your sun or light source is before you begin. Your highlights, shadows, and even the colors in the sky should all support that decision.
🎨 Edges tell the viewer where to look.
Not every cloud edge should be crisp. Hard edges naturally draw attention, while soft edges create depth and atmosphere. A painting with only hard edges~ or only soft ones~ often feels flat.
🌤️ Shadows have color.
Cloud shadows aren’t just gray. They often reflect the color of the sky, picking up blues, violets, and cool grays. During sunrise or sunset, those relationships shift into warmer hues.
🌫️ Suggest more than you describe.
Clouds are constantly changing. If you paint every little bump and wisp, they can start to feel stiff. Suggest the forms, then let the viewer’s eye finish the rest.
Traditional vs. Digital
🎨 Traditional artists:
Work from light to dark (or dark to light, depending on your medium), and remember that lifting paint, glazing, and preserving your whites all create different cloud effects. Watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and oils each handle edges differently~ lean into what your medium does best instead of forcing it to behave like another.
💻 Digital artists:
It’s tempting to rely on cloud brushes, blur tools, or smudge tools, but they work best after you’ve established the form. Build the cloud first, then use your digital tools to enhance it—not to replace the underlying structure.
One last tip…
GO OUTSIDE~!!!
Some of the best cloud studies you’ll ever make won’t happen at your desk.
Watch how clouds change throughout the day, before a storm, or during sunset.
Take reference photos~!!! (Especially if you see lighting/ a form/ something that you like)
Notice how light wraps around them and how the colors shift with the time of day.
Nature has already solved the problem for us~ we just have to learn to observe it~!
These principles apply across traditional and digital media.
The tools may differ, but the fundamentals remain the same.
6
7 comments
☁️ Painting Clouds: Beyond Fluffy
powered by
skool.com/theartcollectiveinternational-5768
A welcoming home and hub for artists, creatives, and curious minds to learn, create, share, and grow together.
Suggested communities
Powered by