Creating cumulus clouds from pure imagination can be a daunting task. First of all how do you know where everything goes, where I do you start contours, where do you have light, where do you have shadows? I have a very specific approach to how I create clouds from my imagination and this guide will explain my process. If you can master this approach, creating clouds without reference photos will be a lot easier.
Below you will see a progression sketch I created to show the process from beginning to end. We will start this guide with the top left box.
In the first box I start with an overall shape. So when I’m painting, whether it’s oils or acrylics, I create the overall shape by just painting in the sky area. Instead of just blocking in the entire sky, I actually draw out the shape of the cloud with paint and then paint up filling in all the space above the drawn out cloud. That means that the negative space, or the white canvas that hasn’t been painted yet creates the silhouette of the cloud. From there I paint in the cloud shape all one color. For the sake of this guide lets just say the sky color is blue. We’ll keep it simple (sometimes that’s the best anyway) and say we add some white to the blue to create the first layer of the cloud. The entire cloud shape would be painted in with this lighter value color.
Once the sky is painted in, and the cloud shape is painted in all in one color we move to box 2.
Clouds are basically a bunch of shifts in value. So in box 2 I take the cloud color I had in box 1 and add a little white to it to make it lighter (but only slightly lighter). I take that lighter color and I start creating contours. This is the hard part for people to do using their imagination, but I take a very complex idea and make it simple. If you look at box 2 I’ve added 5 little white lines that represent contours. I’ve broken up the cloud by adding these contours. A lot of times someone might think you have to take the contour from one side of the cloud to the other, but that’s rarely true. A lot of times the contours dissolve into the rest of the cloud so you see the rounded shape and then it kind of just blends into the rest of the cloud. So in box 2 I’ve created some of those unique shapes, and put plenty of vertical space between them because of later steps.
Now if you look at box 3, this shows how I paint in the area above the contour. Look back at box 2 for a moment. You’ll see some arrows pointing up and away from the contours. This signifies which direction I paint after creating the contour. So in box 2 I lay down the paint creating the shape of the contour and then I fill in up and away. This leaves a dark edge to the contour and lighter area just above it. Look at box 2 and then 3. Box 2 shows creating the shapes and the box 3 shows after you paint up and away from the contours. The trick is to have the paint get slightly darker in value as you move up and away from the contour you just created. So to do that, you don’t use dark paint as you move up, you just have less paint so it’s less concentrated. This allows the darker color underneath to make it appear darker as you move away from the contour. It’s all about the amount of paint you use. So you create the contour and blend up and away, the paint gets thinner as you paint up and away and that makes it appear darker.
If you look at box 3 at this point you’ll notice the cloud isn’t that light yet. It has some shape, but the value is a midtone which allows us a lot of room to go lighter. So with that, we move to box 4.
In box 4 we take the space between the contours and add more contours to break those areas up into smaller spots. The trick here is to break up the top part of the cloud more than the bottom. Usually the bottom of the cloud has fewer contours and broken up areas. It’s usually just a voluminous mass toward the bottom. To create these contours we make our cloud color slightly lighter. We follow the above technique by creating the contour and painting up and away, letting the paint run out as we get further away from the starting point to allow the paint to go from light to slightly darker.
In box 5 we are breaking down those areas even further. Going, again, a little bit lighter with our paint. We aren’t covering the entire cloud with contours, we are focusing more at the top where it is more likely to have a lot of contours or bumps. If you look at box 5 we start painting some contours together, and making the less “line like.” What I mean by that is we don’t want a bunch of line contours. We want unique shapes, some long contours, some really short. Some overlap and run into each other. This is where it gets a little bit more complicated, but we are still using the same concepts as above but in a smaller more concentrated area. You can also see I start putting more light color on the left side (light source). So by determining the light source a little bit later in the painting gives you flexibility. Based on the composition (we’ll cover composition more in a future guide), we can start showing the light source at this point in the clouds. You’ll notice I just suggest small contour shapes on the right hand side that is more in shadow. Also in box 5 I add a few more broken up contours on the bottom left hand side of the cloud since this is where the light source is coming in and would most likely create more contours that are visible to the eye in that area. Also in box 5 I add a flat bottom to the cloud. Usually I do this in the painting by painting in light sky color under the cloud rather than painting the flat shape directly.
In box 6 we take it a step further. We emphasize some of the light areas with more white. We aren’t really adding more contours at this point, we are mostly blending colors together making sure there are smooth transitions of light to dark. We also bring up the value on the left hand side to make it more illuminated. In some areas just above the contours we add some really bright white to give that really bright illumination. Almost like light is shooting out from within the cloud. Also in box 6 we add more shadow back in. We don’t want to go too dark, but adding in a little bit of shadow to the bottom of the cloud and to some areas on the right will make the light areas look even lighter and create some nice contrast. I also like to add little bits of reflected light in the shadow areas. If you look at box 6 you’ll notice those little areas of light on the right side in sporadic areas. Not only does this create nice value, it also creates a more 3D look to the clouds. Also notice in box 6 how there aren’t a lot of defined contours in the bottom area of the cloud. This is by design. We want that area to look puffy and voluminous but too many contours all over the cloud actually will make it look flatter. So keep those contours broken up more at the top and get more sporadic and spaced out as you move down. They’ll also be a bit darker in value.
Want to try out this technique? Here are a few online painting lessons that show how it’s done. Click on the images below to go to the lesson pages:
