Watercolour skies
A great sky can really make a landscape painting, yet I confess I really struggle to make my skies look real without overworking them to death. I thought I’d use some of today to focus a bit more on skies and to see how I got on. Remember that time spent practicing is almost never wasted; even if the results seem pretty dire (as they often do), we probably learn more from our mistakes than our successes.
My colour palette for this excercise was a simple one: Cobalt Blue/Cerulean Blue for the main sky area, Burnt Umber/Ultramarine Blue for the shadow sides of the clouds, plus a bit of yellow (I think I used Quinacridone Gold) for the ground in the last example. The paper is CansonXL 300g per square metre - not a bad budget paper, considering, but I do find it’s prone to cockling severely if I put on too much water - so take it easy with the wetness!
In the top left panel, I was trying to emulate a method I saw from Scratchmade Journal; wetting the top/blue part of the sky whilst avoiding the areas to be left white and dropping colour in to wet areas. I feel I made a bit of a hash of this one, and seem to have left far too many hard edges that look distinctly un-cloudlike.
The top right example is an attempt to follow the Eric Yi Lin (Cafe Watercolor) style of simple clouds. I pre-wetted the entire paper, omitted the white parts of the clouds with my initial blue wash, then added shadows and used a “thirsty” brush to expand the white areas. I’m fairly satisfied with this effort, although the coverage of the blue bits is not as even as I might have liked. The softer edges achieved by laying the wash onto damp paper is far less distracting, in my opinion.
The bottom two examples are done the same way - large washes avoiding the white of the clouds, with the white sections cleaned up a bit with a thirsty brush if the paint had run into them a bit too much. I’m reasonably pleased with these - the bottom right one is nice and moody, although I left a few hard edges as the paper dried, which I should probably have softened a bit.
Overall, a useful practice session. I’ll keep working on the skies!
