painting clouds Archives | Carol L. Douglas

March 8, 2021

Monday Morning Art School: clouds are not flat

Clouds have volume and are subject to the rules of perspective.

Clouds over Whiteface Mountain, oil on canvasboard, available.

Clouds are not flat. The same perspective rules that apply to objects on the ground also apply to objects in the air. We are sometimes misled about that because clouds that appear to be almost overhead are, in fact, a long distance away.

I’ve alluded before to two-point perspective. I’ve never gotten too specific because it’s a great theoretical concept but a lousy way to draw. Today I’ll explain it.

A two-point perspective grid. You don’t need to draw all those rays, just the horizon line. The vertical lines indicate the edges of your paper.

Draw a horizontal line somewhere near the middle of your paper. This horizon line represents the height of your eyeballs. Put dots on the far left and far right ends of this line, at the edges of your paper. These are your vanishing points.

All objects in your drawing must be fitted to rays coming from those points. A cube is the simplest form of this. Start with a vertical line; that’s the front corner of your block. It can be anywhere on your picture. Bound it by extending ray lines back to the vanishing points. Make your first block transparent, just so you can see how the rays cross in the back. This is the fundamental building block of perspective drawing, and everything else derives from it. You can add architectural flourishes using the rules I gave for drawing windows and doors that fit.

A cube drawn with perspective rays. It’s that simple.

I’ve included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity.

As a practical tool, two-point perspective breaks down quickly. In reality, those vanishing points are infinitely distant from you. But it’s hard to align a ruler to an infinitely-distant point, so we draw finite points at the edges of our paper. They throw the whole drawing into a fake exaggeration of perspective. That’s why I started with a grid where the vanishing points were off the paper. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it less obvious.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

(There is also three-point perspective, which gives us an ant’s view of things, and four-point perspective, which gives a fish-eye distortion reminiscent of mid-century comic book art. And there are even more complex perspective schemes. At that point, you’ve left painting and entered a fantastical world of technical drawing.)

Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.

Still, two-point perspective is useful for understanding clouds. Clouds follow the rules of perspective, being smaller, flatter and less distinct the farther they are from the viewer. The difference is that the vanishing point is at the bottom of the object, rather than the top as it is with terrestrial objects.

Cumulus clouds have flat bases and fluffy tops, and they tend to run in patterns across the sky. I’ve rendered them as slabs, using the same basic perspective rules as I would for a house. They may be far more fantastical in shape, but they obey this same basic rule of design.

You can see that basic perspective when looking at a photo of cumulus clouds.

A flight of cumulus clouds or a mackerel sky will be at a consistent altitude. That means their bottoms are on the same plane. However, there can be more than one cloud formation mucking around up there. That’s particularly true where there’s a big, scenic object like the ocean or a mountain in your vista. These have a way of interfering with the orderly patterns of clouds.

I don’t expect you to go outside and draw clouds using a perspective grid. This is for understanding the concept before you tackle the subject. Then you’ll be more likely to see clouds marching across the sky in volume, rather than as puffy white shapes pasted on the surface of your painting.

May 1, 2017

Painting the coming storm

When you start to feel the patterns of nature in your bones, painting becomes less like science and more like dancing.

The colors in a good rain cloud are close in value. It’s mostly color temperature that will create shape.

Last week we did “suffer a sea-change/into something rich and strange.” This was Spring, which was ushered in on great banks of fog and rain. Coincidentally, I have been painting a moody, changeable sky in my studio, since it’s been too wet to paint out-of-doors.

I’ve written about painting clouds here, and about great painters of clouds here. Right now, I am painting a great pile of dark cumulonimbusclouds. This is part of a larger canvas of the schooner American Eagle rounding Owl’s Head.

No, I’m not ready to unveil the finished work. Captain says I need more air in the sails.

It makes sense to test color modulations before you commit to them. I’m not trying to match here, but to see how the two colors interact.

Since there is no sun in my painting, the clouds are very low in tonal contrast. This means there is little difference in value between the lightest tones and the darkest tones. That suits my purpose artistically, because the heaving sea is already busy enough.

Even on sunny days the tonal contrast in clouds is less than you might think. A brightly lit cumulus cloud contrasts starkly against a deep blue sky. Within itself, however, it doesn’t have particularly big jumps in value. Instead of relying on tonal contrast, use color temperature.

Readers will send me photos to disprove this, but there are differences between photos and what the naked eye sees. This is especially true for photos taken with devices designed to optimize digital images. In general, polarizing lenses increase contrast in clouds and skies.

Clouds usually have extremely soft edges. I’ve added a short video showing the use of a flat badger brush to make those soft edges. I’m generally a pretty direct painter. Blending clouds is almost the only time I apply a soft brush to canvas.

Last week, one of my students asked me why the band of ocean at the horizon was darker than the water closer to us. “If you can figure out a consistent pattern to the light in the sea, you’re doing better than me,” I told him. The sea is infinitely changeable. So too is the sky.

Fresh brushwork is the final step, over blended surfaces.

You learn about different skies by being out in them and drawing and painting them. At some point, you internalize your understanding. After that, you can start playing lyrically with their structure.

There is no one form that clouds must take, any more than there are specific forms that waves take, or uniformly matching snowflakes, or patterns in which petals will cascade down in an orchard on a spring breeze. Nature reveals herself in infinitely varied, controlled chaos. You must watch and learn, but when you start to feel those patterns in your bones, painting becomes more akin to dancing than to science.

April 20, 2017

Masters of the northern skies

On a bitter spring day, a painter’s thoughts turn to clouds and how to paint them. It beats going outside.

Rainstorm over the Sea, c.1824-28, John Constable

Yesterday, I asked Shary Cobb Fellows whether the Mary Day had hauled last year. “I think so,” she mused, “because these boats need their bottoms done every year.”

“Then how did I miss her?” I wondered. A few hours in the blistering, paint-peeling wind answered that question. It was probably too miserable to paint that week.

I wrapped myself in the blizzard blanket that’s still in my car. However, I could barely squeeze the paint out of my tubes. My easel was thrumming in the wind. I’ve got a good start and if the weather cooperates before the Mary Day moves out, I’ll be able to finish.

Easter Morning, 1835, Caspar David Friedrich

Most of the schooner fleet were originally coastal cargo or fishing boats, saved from ignominious decay in some shaded inlet by their conversion to the tourist trade. Mary Dayis different; she was purpose-built in the 1960s as a tourist boat. I chose a high angle, painting off an access road that leads down into the shipyard. It’s a pretty view, but it magnified the wind, and the sky was terribly gloomy.

Gloom has its purposes. Caspar David Friedrich used it to convey a world in mourning in his Easter Morning, above.

The Thames above Waterloo Bridge, c. 1830-5 Joseph Mallord William Turner

Fog, too, can convey emotional moods as varied as that in Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect to J. M. W. Turner’s The Thames above Waterloo Bridge. They were both painting the dangerous industrial pea soupers that plagued London until the Clean Air Act of 1956, and they handled the subject in very different ways.

The Maas at Dordrecht, c. 1650, Aelbert Cuyp

When the land is flat and low or the subject is the sea, clouds assume monumental importance. It is no surprise that the Dutch Golden Age Painters had a particular mastery of the sky in all its phases and seasons.

The Danish painter Christen Købke had a special affinity for the flat, low light of the far north, in those times when clouds barely permeate the overall gloom. A nationalist and a Romantic, he was determined to paint his nation’s delicate beauty on its own terms.

Roof Ridge Of Frederiksborg Castle, Christen Købke

John Constable did many field studies of clouds, which are startling in their modernity. “Skies must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition,” he wrote. “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment.”

The example I’ve shown is close to a modern gesture drawing, a quick capture of that moment when the clouds start dumping their load of water as they move in from the sea. It is not just a rainstorm, it is “an extraordinary force of emotion,” as critic Andrew Shirley observed.

An Teallach between Bristol and Mullagragh, James Morrison, University of Sterling Art Collection

The finest cloud painter working today is Scotland’s James Morrison. Born in Glasgow in 1932, he studied at the Glasgow School of Art and is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy. His paintings of the landscapes around his home in Angus and of Assynt in Sutherland are, in truth, mostly sky studies. He is a meticulous observer of the movement and development of clouds.

I have written about how to paint clouds here, using examples from my own work. It’s important to know the different types of clouds and how they move across space. Yes, you can paint clouds without being able to draw, but they’re not going to be as convincing as those that are carefully observed. As with everything, practice makes perfect.

September 6, 2016

Painting clouds

“Whiteface makes its own weather,” by Carol L. Douglas. High contrast clouds and a flat brush imply rain.

Clouds are a terrific, rampaging part of the landscape, and often the best part of a composition. I love painting them. They seem so easy that I never figured there was much secret gnosis to painting them, any more than there is some magic trick to painting water. However, last week a reader wrote asking for tips about painting clouds, and she got me thinking about how I manage them.

Clouds have perspective, but it is upside-down from earth-bound objects. That’s because the vanishing point is the horizon, putting the farthest clouds at the bottom of the sky. While we mostly look at the tops of earthbound objects, we mostly look at the bottoms of clouds. That makes the shadow color predominant.

Altocumulus clouds over the Hudson River, by Carol L. Douglas

As with earthbound objects, there is also atmospheric perspective: clouds are generally lighter and duller at the horizon. This, however, is subject to circumstances. At dawn and dusk the horizon may be the most colorful part of the sky. A good storm turns everything on its head.

Figuring out the color of clouds is easy: there’s a color for the highlights, and a color for the shadows, and these are more or less opposite each other in color temperature. On a peaceful day, the values of shadow and highlight are almost the same. When there’s a real range in value in the clouds, you have an ominous sky.

Surf study by Carol L. Douglas

Note and use the patterns of clouds, rather than randomly placing one or two clouds in the canvas. The pattern should be part of your design. White, puffy cumulus clouds often appear in repetitive patterns across the sky. Cumulonimbus clouds are towering portents of rain or worse. These are the clouds that often have dark shadows and odd coloring, for they are livid.

A mackerel sky, high in the atmosphere, is a sky knitting itself together in advance of a change in the weather. “Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails,” is an acknowledgement of this phenomenon. High-atmosphere clouds have no volume. They are merely regular patterns of white against a blue sky.

Higher cirrus clouds at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas

Higher cirrus clouds (above) and cumulus clouds (horizon) at Olana, by Carol L. Douglas

I used to live in the Great Lakes region. If I looked north, I would almost always see a band of cumulus clouds low on the horizon, racing down the center of Lake Ontario. Such local weather patterns exist all over the country. They are part of the ‘sense of place’ where you live. You can’t paint them until you observe them.

How do I translate those observations onto my canvas? In practice, I mix a puddle of the shadow color of the cloud and a puddle of the light color. I race around, first with the shadow color and then with the highlight color, to create a pattern. When that is established, I used particular clouds as reference to finish the details. Since clouds constantly morph, there is no danger of repetitiveness. This is the only time I ever use straight white from the tube, for it sometimes acts as my mid-tone in clouds.

“Clouds over Hudson, NY,” by Carol L. Douglas

What brush? As with everything else, it depends on what you are trying to say with your mark-making. A flat will convey energy. A filbert or round will allow you to be more lyrical. It’s up to you.

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Collection, was very particular in how his paintings were hung. He believed that he could improve individual paintings’ compositions by juxtaposing paintings and furnishings in the greater space of a room. That’s pretty cheeky considering the Impressionist masterpieces he collected, but in his defense, nobody knew they were masterpieces yet.

You can use clouds in your painting to redirect the viewer in the same way. Although—like water—clouds’ patterns are usually wavelike and horizontal, there is no reason to be hidebound about that. Within the reality of their structure, you can find ways to lift and lead the viewers’ eyes.

The greatest painter of clouds alive today is the Glasgow-trained landscape artist,James Morrison. I strongly encourage you to study his paintings, to see how his clouds have volume, character and energy. They are never an afterthought in the landscape; they are a potent force within it.