Leaving Whites: Clouds Without Lifting
Okay. We've done flat skies, we've done graded skies. Today we're doing clouds, and I want to head something off before we start.
If your instinct is "I'll paint the sky and then lift out the cloud shapes with a damp brush after," I need you to set that instinct down for this lesson. Lifting works fine on some papers, in some climates, on some days. It does not work reliably here. Our air pulls a wash dry faster than you think, and once it's set, dragging a brush back through it doesn't lift color cleanly, it just disturbs the paper and leaves you a smeary gray ghost where a cloud was supposed to be. I ruined a genuinely nice sheet this way years ago, trying to lift clouds out of a wash that had already locked in. That's not a story I tell for fun. It's the reason this whole lesson exists.
So instead, we're leaving the whites. Which means deciding where the clouds are before you touch water to paper, and painting around them.
The idea
A cloud, in most skies you're painting, is just paper that never gets touched. Not paper that gets painted white — there's no white paint doing the work, unless you're using body color, which we're not today. It's the paper itself, left alone, doing the job.
That means the whole lesson happens before your brush loads. You're not painting clouds. You're painting sky and leaving gaps.
What you'll need
- Your sky blue mix from a couple lessons back, or something close to it — I'm still not going to give you a recipe, it's a bluish gray with something warm in it, mix it by eye
- A medium round or a flat, whatever you tested well in that brush lesson
- A pencil, actual pencil, not just a mental plan
- Water, two containers, one for mixing and one for rinsing
- A paper towel, dry, sitting right next to your hand
Steps
1. Pencil in your cloud shapes first. Light lines. Not outlines you're going to paint inside of like a coloring book — more like landmarks so you don't lose track of where the white needs to stay. Keep the shapes irregular. Real clouds are lumpy and uneven, and a perfectly oval cloud reads as a mistake even though technically it's more "correct" than a lumpy one. Vary the sizes too — one big shape and two or three small ones reads as sky. Three same-sized ovals reads as a taco. I know this from experience. A coworker at the shop once looked over my shoulder at a painting of the point of the mountain I was doing from memory between clients and asked if it was a taco. I have never fully recovered from that, and I think about it every time I space cloud shapes.
2. Load your brush with the sky mix and start at the top of the paper, away from any cloud shapes. Get a full stroke going, side to side, same as your flat sky pass.
3. When you get to the edge of a cloud shape, stop the paint there. Don't paint around the tiny edge trying to hug the pencil line perfectly — go up to it, stop, lift your brush, and move to the next stretch of sky past the cloud. You will leave a slightly rough edge. Good. Clouds have soft, irregular edges in real light anyway, this is doing you a favor.
4. Keep going across the sky, treating every cloud shape as a wall your brush stops at. This is slower than a plain flat wash. That's fine. You're not racing the dry time here because you're not trying to blend anything — you're leaving discrete white shapes, so a little bit of edge inconsistency between passes barely matters.
5. Once the sky is in and the whites are left alone, walk away. Don't go back and "clean up" a cloud edge with a damp brush. I know it's tempting. The edge will look a little ragged while it's wet and your brain will tell you to fix it. Don't. Wet paper heals a lot of that raggedness as it dries — this is one of the few places our air actually helps you, because it locks the edge down fast before you can second-guess it into mud.
6. Once it's bone dry, you can go back in with a light gray-violet, very diluted, and add just a whisper of shadow to the underside of one or two clouds. Not all of them. One shadowed cloud in a sky full of clean white ones gives you depth without you having to explain what you did. Keep this pass small. One stroke, maybe two, per cloud. If you find yourself adding a third stroke to "get it right," stop, that's the overworking instinct again and it'll flatten the whole effect.
The opinion part
I feel like people massively overcomplicate clouds because they think of them as objects to render, with volume and shading, like you'd paint a rock. They're not that, most of the time, in a landscape sky. They're absences. The sky is where beginners die, and clouds are usually where they die twice, once from painting the sky itself too much, and again from fussing over cloud shapes that were fine the first time. Fewer strokes, commit, walk away — same rule as always, it just applies to negative space this time instead of positive.
One caution: if you do use a hair dryer to speed a dry patch along so you can get to the shadow pass sooner, keep it moving and keep it a few inches back. Paper scorches faster than you'd guess, and warped paper won't lay flat for the shadow pass anyway.
Before next time
Do two of these skies, minimum. On the second one, try leaving one cloud shape bigger than feels natural. See if it still reads as sky instead of as a mistake.