Category: clouds

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Monday Morning Art School: drawing realistic clouds

 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.

This post was originally published on March 8, 2021.

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Paying attention to clouds

What combinations of clouds are present? How frequently do they repeat? Where are they forming? Are they growing tighter or looser? Where is the light coming from?

They wrested their living from the sea (Advocate Harbour), by Carol L. Douglas

Yesterday, I gave a lesson on perspective in clouds. It’s also important to understand the variety of clouds in the sky.

When you’re on the edge of something big, like a mountain range or an ocean, the clouds often scramble themselves into strange and magnificent patterns trying to adjust to the updraft of odd air. Erie PA and the Tug Hill Plateau have bewitching skies because they’re drafting on a Great Lake. (That’s also why they get so much snow.)
Clouds are classified by their shape, the altitude they form at, and their opacity. All are important to the painter.
Various cloud types, 2005, by Christopher M. Klaus at w:en:Argonne National Laboratory
Cumulus clouds are the big, generous puffy clouds we love to paint. The ones that form pillows tend to be low in the atmosphere; the smaller ones are higher up. Cumulus clouds have flat bottoms and puffy tops. As a rule, the bigger the clouds, the more there is cooking, convection-wise.
Cumulus clouds can join up to create massive cloud sheets. These stratocumulusclouds are different from stratus clouds in that they’re warped, buckled, and rolled. Where they drift over land, the extremes of weather are reduced. That makes them both good and bad news in the Great Lakes regions: they keep the weather temperate, but they also create lots of dull weather.
Cobequid Bay farm, by Carol L. Douglas
Cumulinimbus clouds are the prima donnas of the cloud world, the towering giants we like to call “thunderheads.” They’re so big, they cross levels of the atmosphere. They’re a good news, bad news sight. They’re dramatic and fascinating to paint, but they also mean you may get dumped on, or worse, soon.
Stratus clouds are flat sheets of grey that can form at any altitude. At ground level, they’re fog. As they get higher in the atmosphere, they assume different names, along with better lighting and color: cirrostratus (high-level), altostratus (mid-level), and nimbostratus (multi-level), but they’re all really the same thing. Here in the east we often get high-level sheets of stratus cloud above cumulus clouds. When I see them, I always try to include them in my paintings, for the differences in color and form are appealing.
Cape Blomidon makes its own cloud, by Carol L. Douglas
Cirrus clouds are the most interesting and difficult to paint convincingly. These are the clouds sometimes called “mare’s tails.” They are generally translucent, and look like long, detached, strings or filaments in the sky. They can develop around thunderheads as dependencies. They are often seen above other cloud formations, doing their own thing in the sky.
Watch the sky over time. What combinations of clouds are present? How frequently do clouds repeat? Where are they forming? Are they growing tighter or looser? Where is the light coming from? Paying attention will add to the depth and character of your skies.

It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, at Rye Art Center, or at Genesee Valley this summer.
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Monday Morning Art School: drawing clouds

Clouds are objects with volume, obeying the rules of perspective.

Whiteface makes its own weather, by Carol L. Douglas
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 and the two vanishing points.

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. These are your vanishing points.

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

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.

All objects can be rendered from that basic cube.

I’ve included a simple landscape perspective here, omitting some of the backside lines for the sake of clarity. (I apologize for the computer drawing; I’m recovering from surgery and it’s hard to draw with my foot up.)

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.
Staircase in two-point perspective, 1995, Luciano Testoni. 
The example above is from Wikipedia’s article on perspective. It’s a masterful drawing, but it isn’t true two-point perspective, because he tosses in several additional points. 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 fine art and entered technical drawing.
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.
Basic shapes of clouds using the same perspective grid.
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. If I wasn’t elevating my foot, I’d have finished this by twisting and changing their shapes in my imaginary bounding boxes.
Mackerel sky forming over the Hudson, by Carol L. Douglas
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 experimenting at home before you go outside. 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.
It’s about time for you to consider your summer workshop plans. Join me on the American Eagle, at Acadia National Park, at Rye Art Center, or at Genesee Valley this summer.
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Painting clouds

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

“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

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

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

“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.
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Secret superpower

The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, by Carol L Douglas. Still in draft form, I’m afraid.
I generally feel about clouds the way Winslow Homer felt about rocks: they’re easy to paint. So I wasn’t expecting to be tripped up by this painting. But when I finished my first iteration, I realized it was too monochromatically grey.
I mixed three different greys and went at it with both hands. Most of us Lefties have a secret superpower—we’re more or less ambidextrous. I can write and paint with either hand, although my right one tires more quickly.
Added greys. I think it actually looked better here than when “finished.”
I don’t usually paint two-handed, because I only have one brain. In certain situations, such as when laying down large masses or alternately painting and blending, it’s a useful skill.
Two-fisted painter.
Unfortunately, I fixed the chroma problem but seem to have lost the original organization. I’ll go back in with some darks when this has a chance to set up, but for now I am moving on to my next painting. I have to hang this show a week from tomorrow.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!