Clouds by lifting, not by painting
Okay. Last lesson you did a plain sky wash from a reference photo — one color, wet, graded from dark at the top to light at the horizon. This lesson is where the clouds go into that sky. And the trick, which nobody tells you when you start, is that you don't paint clouds. You take color away to make them.
That took me way longer to accept than it should have. My instinct, every time, was to reach for white paint and add a cloud shape on top like I was decorating a cake. Watercolor doesn't work that way. You've only got the white of the paper to work with, so the cloud has to come from lifting pigment back off, not putting more on.
Why lifting works
Wet watercolor sits on top of the paper for a little while before it sinks in and sets. During that window, a damp brush or a piece of paper towel can pull pigment back out. That's it. That's the whole secret. You're not painting a cloud, you're erasing a hole in the sky where a cloud goes.
Here's where the dry air actually matters again, like I keep saying it does. In American Fork that window is short. Humid-climate tutorials will tell you that you've got a minute or two to lift color. Out here you might have twenty, thirty seconds before the wash has flattened out and set. So you need to lift fast, and you need your sky wash still properly wet when you do it, not just damp-looking.
What you need
- Your sky wash from last lesson, or a fresh one — one blue, graded top to bottom, still wet
- A round brush, size 6 or 8, rinsed clean and squeezed almost dry
- A folded paper towel or a clean rag
- A little patience with the fact that this will look messy before it looks right
The steps
- Lay your sky wash exactly like last time. Don't let it dry.
- While it's still wet and glossy-looking, take your clean, damp (not soaked) brush and gently touch it to the area where you want a cloud. Lift, don't scrub. A light dab, hold it a beat, pull it away.
- Rinse the brush, squeeze it out again, and do it again for the next spot. Rinse between lifts or you're just moving blue paint around instead of taking it out.
- For a softer, more natural cloud edge, blot with a folded paper towel instead of the brush. Press, don't rub. This gives you those soft, torn-looking edges real clouds actually have.
- Step back. Let it dry completely before you decide whether it worked. Wet lifted areas look more dramatic than they'll be once dry — the paper reabsorbs some of that blue back into the fibers as it sets.
- If a cloud shape came out too hard-edged, you were probably too slow, or your wash had already started to set before you got to it. That's fine. Try it again on a fresh wash. This is a technique that wants repetition more than it wants perfection the first time.
A caution, plainly
Don't scrub at the paper with the brush, especially on the cheap stuff you should still be using at this stage in the course. Scrubbing lifts the paper fibers along with the pigment, and once those fibers are roughed up, that spot will always take paint unevenly after that. Light touch. Lift, don't dig.
My opinion on this
I still think reference photos beat imagination here, same as I've said before. Look up a real cloud photo, even just out your own window if there's anything interesting happening up canyon that day, and lift shapes that resemble what's actually there. Your brain has a cartoon idea of what a cloud looks like — puffy, symmetrical, sitting neatly in the middle of the sky — and real clouds are almost never that tidy. Paint what's in front of you and it'll look more convincing than what's in your head.
This is also, incidentally, exactly why I don't paint people. I tried once to use my own hand as a reference for a drawing exercise, thought it'd be simple since I could just look at it, and it came out looking like a catcher's mitt. Bless my own effort there. Hands have too many small decisions happening at once — knuckle, then knuckle, then knuckle, then a thumb doing something weird. Clouds and hands are opposites that way. A cloud is forgiving. You can lift a rough oval shape and it'll read as a cloud. Lift a rough oval shape where a thumb should be and it reads as a mitten. Landscapes don't have hands, so I stick to landscapes.
Before next time
Do this on two or three different sky washes if you've got the paper for it — one lift with the brush, one lift with paper towel, one where you deliberately wait too long so you can see what "too late" looks like. You want to feel that window closing, not just hear me describe it.