A plain sky wash from a reference photo
Okay. You've got salt and lifting and all the cheap texture tricks now. This lesson we're putting some of that away for a minute and doing the most basic thing there is: a flat sky, wet-into-wet, off a photo you actually took or found.
I want to be clear up front that "plain" is the point. No clouds, no drama, no gradient that goes five directions. Just sky. If you can lay down a calm, even wash without it turning blotchy or streaky, a lot of other stuff in this class gets easier, because half of landscape painting is just skies sitting quietly behind everything else doing their job.
Pick your reference
Grab a photo with a simple sky in it. Something you took off your own back patio is perfect. Doesn't need clouds, doesn't need color drama. I actually prefer a boring sky photo for this exercise, one of those hazy August afternoons where it's just pale blue fading toward white near the horizon. That gradient is the whole lesson.
Look at the photo and actually name the colors before you touch a brush. This is the thing I harp on: your brain will lie to you about what color the sky is. It'll tell you "blue," and you'll grab straight blue out of the pan, and it'll look like a cartoon. Look closer. Near the top it's usually a deeper blue with maybe a hint of violet. Near the horizon it washes out toward a warm, pale gray or even a little yellow, especially in that hazy Utah haze we get in the summer. Reference photos beat imagination for this exact reason. Your eyes know what a sky "should" look like and they'll talk you out of what's actually there.
Set up before you wet anything
Tape your paper down on all four sides. Tilt your board slightly, maybe 10-15 degrees, propped on a book or a paint tube. This matters more for skies than almost anything else we've done, because you want the wash to settle downward slowly instead of pooling wherever it wants.
Mix two puddles before you start: - A darker blue-violet for the top of the sky - A pale, warm, almost-not-there color for the horizon — mostly water with a whisper of pigment
Mix more than you think you need. Running out of wash mid-stroke is how you get hard lines where you didn't want them, and out here that happens fast because the paper's already drinking the water back out of your brush before you've finished the stroke.
The wash itself
Wet the whole sky area first with clean water, edge to edge, no dry spots. This is your buffer. It's what lets the color glide instead of grab.
Starting at the top, lay a horizontal stroke of your darker blue-violet, full width. Don't go back over it. Second stroke right below, slightly overlapping. Keep going down the page, and every stroke or two, add a little more water to your mix so it's getting paler as you go. By the time you're near the horizon you should be laying down almost pure water with the faintest color in it.
Tilt the board a touch more if the color's not moving. Let gravity help you. This is not a fussy, controlled technique. It's more like tipping a bowl of soup very slightly and watching it find its own level.
Then leave it alone. This is the hard part for most people. Set the brush down and walk away. In this dry air a wash like this sets up in a few minutes, not the twenty or thirty you'll see quoted in tutorials filmed somewhere humid. If you keep poking at it "just to fix one spot," you'll get a bloom or a hard edge exactly where you touched it.
A word about mud, and about Leonardo
You will probably get a little muddy patch somewhere in this wash, especially where your two puddles meet in the middle. That's fine. Genuinely fine. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: mud is a color, not a mistake, and a hazy summer sky actually has a little muddiness built into it in real life.
I think about this every time because of Leonardo. He was three, got into my paint set while I wasn't watching, and mixed every single pan together into one gray-brown puddle. I was annoyed for about ten seconds. Then I looked at it sitting there on the palette and realized it was the exact color of the foothills behind our house in August. Now I mix that color on purpose. A kid's disaster taught me a paint mix I still use. So don't panic if your sky picks up a little gray-brown murk near the horizon. That might be the truest color in the whole painting.
One caution
Keep your water cup away from the taped edges of your paper. It's an easy knock, and a spilled cup on a wet wash will absolutely erase twenty minutes of careful gradient in about two seconds. Ask me how I know.
Before next time
Do this same wash twice more on scrap paper, once faster than feels comfortable and once slower. You're building a feel for how much time you actually have before this dry air takes the choice away from you.