Clouds by lifting, not by painting
The previous lesson produced a plain sky wash from a reference photo — one color, wet, graded from dark at the top to light at the horizon. This lesson puts clouds into that sky, and the governing principle, which nobody mentions at the start, is that you do not paint clouds. You take color away to make them.
That principle is hard to accept at first. The instinct is to reach for white paint and add a cloud shape on top, like decorating a cake. Watercolor does not work that way: you have only the white of the paper, 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 is the entire mechanism — you are not painting a cloud, you are erasing a hole in the sky where a cloud goes.
Dry air sets the timing, as it keeps doing. In American Fork that window is short: humid-climate tutorials promise a minute or two to lift color, but out here you may have twenty to thirty seconds before the wash flattens and sets. Two requirements follow — lift fast, and keep the sky wash 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 looks messy before it looks right.
The steps
- Lay your sky wash exactly like last time. Do not let it dry.
- While it is 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, do not scrub — a light dab, hold it a beat, pull it away.
- Rinse the brush, squeeze it out again, and repeat for the next spot. Rinse between lifts, or you are 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, do not rub. This gives the soft, torn-looking edges real clouds have.
- Step back and let it dry completely before judging whether it worked. Wet lifted areas look more dramatic than they will be once dry, because the paper reabsorbs some of that blue back into the fibers as it sets.
- If a cloud came out too hard-edged, you were probably too slow, or the wash had already started to set before you reached it. That is fine — try again on a fresh wash. This technique wants repetition more than it wants first-try perfection.
A caution, plainly
Do not 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. Light touch: lift, do not dig.
A note on references
Reference photos beat imagination here, same as before. Look up a real cloud photo — even just out your own window if something interesting is happening up canyon — and lift shapes that resemble what is actually there. The brain carries a cartoon of a cloud: puffy, symmetrical, sitting neatly in the middle of the sky. Real clouds are almost never that tidy, and painting what is in front of you reads as more convincing than what is in your head.
This is also, incidentally, why I do not paint people. My one attempt to use my own hand as a drawing reference came out looking like a catcher's mitt. Hands hold too many small decisions at once — knuckle, then knuckle, then knuckle, then a thumb doing something odd. Clouds and hands are opposites: a cloud is forgiving, so a rough lifted oval reads as a cloud, while a rough oval where a thumb should be reads as a mitten. Landscapes have no hands, so I stay with landscapes.
Before next time
Do this on two or three different sky washes if you have the paper for it — one lift with the brush, one with the paper towel, and 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.