Sky Studies

This week I spent some time working on sky studies. Clouds and sunsets, colors and techniques to improve my landscapes.

Prompted by World Watercolor Month for clouds last week, I decided to spend more time getting to know skies a bit more. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time up there and I certainly have seen some beautiful skies.

Steve Mitchell, The Mind of Watercolor, had a good tutorial on clouds the other day working in both wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques. As you can see in these to photographs each has its own merits depending upon the affect I’m trying to achieve. Naturally I didn’t want to waste the paint and time so what do we to with two cloud/sky studies? We add a landscape of course!

My wet-on-wet sky seemed just right for a landscape taken from a photo Ilene took at Donner Lake in California. Yes, Donner Lake named after the ill-fated pioneer group led by George Donner. In the summer the lake is beautiful and you can see the Sierra Nevada mountains beyond still covered with snow.

World Watercolor Month had a prompt for a skyline so I used the wet-on-dry painting to create the Las Vegas skyline looking out of the Bellagio toward the Paris and Bally Casinos. I was in a bit of a hurry on this one but you get the idea. It’s about adding in the middle and foregrounds after painting the sky. Oh and by the way, I had NO idea what I’d paint into the foregrounds when I painted these skies. All just a bit a fun.

Sterling Edwards

I ran across some videos by Sterling Edwards doing skies so I thought…why not? Sterling showed me how to add more color to the clouds to give them a more 3-D feel. I struggle sometimes with value (light and shadow) like most fairly new artists so I can see doing more of these exercises in the future.

Once again I started with the sky not having any idea what I’d add into the foreground. The “frigate” in this one actually started as a small island but ended up as a stylized ship.

Not all skies are filled with clouds and one of the greatest challenges in watercolor is how to give brilliant light to a painting. I’ve always been impressed with Thomas, The Painter of Light, Kinkade’s work and getting that type of light into watercolor can be a challenge for a new artist.

Sterling Edwards had a couple of free YouTube videos that discussed the use of color to the the feel of a sunset and the painting on the left was my first attempt at a watercolor sunset. In all fairness, I need to add a bit more contrasting colors but I’m pretty happy with the result and can’t wait to combine what I’ve learned with some of the amazing Mt Rainier photos I’ve gotten from one of my patrons, Barbara Cole-Smith.

So that was my week working with skies, light, value, and color. It’s been fun and I’m looking forward to tweaking my talent and kicking up my paintings a notch.

Hope y’all have a great week…now go make some art!