A plain sky wash from a reference photo
The last few lessons stacked up texture tools — salt, lifting, and the rest. This lesson sets those aside and does the most basic thing there is: a flat sky, wet-into-wet, from a photo you took or found.
"Plain" is the entire point here. No clouds, no drama, no gradient running five directions — just sky. A calm, even wash that does not turn blotchy or streaky makes much of the rest of this class easier, because half of landscape painting is skies sitting quietly behind everything else and doing their job.
Pick your reference
Choose a photo with a simple sky. Something shot off your own back patio is ideal; it needs neither clouds nor color drama. A boring sky photo is actually preferable for this exercise — one of those hazy August afternoons, pale blue fading toward white near the horizon. That gradient is the whole lesson.
Before you touch a brush, name the colors. Your brain will misreport them: it says "blue," you grab straight blue from the pan, and the result looks like a cartoon. Look closer. - Near the top the sky is 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 the hazy Utah summer haze.
This is exactly why reference photos beat imagination: your eyes know what a sky "should" look like and will talk you out of what is actually there.
Set up before you wet anything
1. Tape your paper down on all four sides. 2. 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 have done, because you want the wash to settle downward slowly instead of pooling wherever it likes. 3. 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 leaves hard lines where you did not want them, and out here that happens fast, because the paper is already drinking the water back out of your brush before you finish the stroke.
The wash itself
- Wet the whole sky area first with clean water, edge to edge, no dry spots. This buffer is what lets the color glide instead of grab.
- Starting at the top, lay a horizontal stroke of your darker blue-violet, full width. Do not go back over it.
- Lay a second stroke right below, slightly overlapping. Keep going down the page, and every stroke or two add a little more water so the mix gets paler as you descend. By the horizon you should be laying down almost pure water with the faintest color in it.
- If the color is not moving, tilt the board a touch more and let gravity help — this is closer to tipping a bowl of soup very slightly and watching it find its own level than to any fussy, controlled technique.
- Then leave it alone. Set the brush down and walk away. This is the hard part for most people. In this dry air a wash like this sets up in a few minutes, not the twenty or thirty quoted in tutorials filmed somewhere humid, and poking at it "just to fix one spot" produces a bloom or a hard edge exactly where you touched.
A word about mud, and about Leonardo
You will probably get a small muddy patch somewhere, especially where your two puddles meet in the middle. That is genuinely fine. Mud is a color, not a mistake, and a hazy summer sky has a little muddiness built into it in real life.
The reminder comes from Leonardo. At three, he got into my paint set and mixed every pan together into one gray-brown puddle. The annoyance lasted about ten seconds, until I saw that it was the exact color of the foothills behind our house in August — a color I now mix on purpose. A kid's disaster taught me a paint mix I still use. So do not panic if your sky picks up a little gray-brown murk near the horizon. It may be the truest color in the whole painting.
One caution
Keep your water cup away from the taped edges of your paper. It is an easy knock, and a spilled cup on a wet wash will 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 are building a feel for how much time you actually have before this dry air takes the choice away from you.