Many landscape paintings miss this key ingredient

 

Your first step to enhancing your paintings with expressive skies

We'll focus on improving on photos for paintings, designing with your heart, understanding front lighting and painting towering clouds and warm light.

This is a small lesson from a larger course that I'm building, which will be called Painting Expressive Skies. I expect that to take me 6 months or more. I'm already three months into it. I thought it'd be nice for you to see this one for free, just to whet your appetite for painting expressive skies, and also just to get some feedback from you. If you have any constructive criticism, I'd love to hear from you.

This demo is in acrylics but it's fine for oils too.

Just 6 steps

I’ll guide you all the way.

 

Design

Our job as artists is to bring people's attention to what we find beautiful. In order to do that you need to first identify what those things are for you, and then enhance or exaggerate them. In this one it was towering clouds and warm light.

 

Preparing the surface

It's worth putting in the time to get your painting surface ready to work on. This is an MDF board with 3 coats of acrylic gesso primer and a light toned base coat of yellow ochre plus white. This will help warm the painting and shimmer against the blue-greys.

 

Sky

The sky gradation is the first building block. We can add more warmth into the sky gradation to enhance the feel of the sunset light.

 

Expressive Clouds

Here's your chance to practice making more variety in your paintings, which makes them more interesting to paint and more interesting to view. 

Create variety in:

Shapes - big vs small, complex vs simple.
Colour - warm vs cool, vibrant vs greyed.

Edges - soft vs hard.

Texture - smooth vs rough, thin vs thick.

You need all that variety to keep things interesting and expressive. 

 

Foreground Detail

Adding small details in the foreground makes the clouds appear even larger. So by painting one, you're enhancing the other. If you want the style to remain painterly and expressive throughout, you can create the detail using texture, rather than tiny descriptive brushstrokes.

 

Finshing Touches

A fine signing brush can add a few crisp details like seagulls and floatsam on the beach to add a touch of realism and scale.

 

I'll take you step by step through this whole rich process and you can choose which parts you'd like to try out in your own work.

 

Enjoy!

 

Student Critiques

 

Tropical beach, acrylic with oil glazing, canvas, 39 cm x 39 cm

Artist: Elena Sokolova

Wow that's really nice work Elena. I love the strong colours and the confident fluid brush work. Your values are spot on as well and you have created a really dynamic expressive sky, which was the goal of the lesson, so, well done! The only thing I might recommend is a softer transition from light through to mid values to give the big cloud a more rounded appearance.

 

Tropical Drama Oils, 30cm X 30cm

Artist: Ian States

G'day Ian, I love the feel of this painting! You've done a great job of making those towering clouds look huge and wind swept. I think you're fine detail in the bushes and palm trees have added dramatically to the scale of the clouds, as well as all of those small swishy clouds accompanying the mothership. Having that large cloud cropped out the top of the painting also gives the impression that it is too large to contain the scene which also adds to the scale of it.

One thing you might like to consider is that in these front lighting situations at sunset sometimes the light is warmer closer to horizon and cooler or whiter as it ascends due to the thinner atmosphere higher up.

You you could easily add this lighting effect by glazing a yellow ochre or similar warm colour over the lower reaches of the main cloud and fading it out higher up.

 

Expressive Skies Oil on Oil Paper

Artist: Geoffrey Geeson

That's a really interesting and beautiful take on this painting Geoffrey. I love all the colours variety and interesting brushwork you have in there - quite a symphony!

The one thing I am finding that is attracting from this painting is the very straight edge of the green grasses against the sand. If you just put a big zig zag break in that somewhere whether it is the sand going into the grasses or the grasses coming down onto the sand it will look more natural.

I can see you have made some efforts in that direction already but by stepping back you can see that whoever is tending that lawn is very keen with their whippersnipper and has some military training with it.

Beautiful work!

 

Expressive Skies 12x12 Oil on Canvas

Artist: Nancy Newton

Nice design, Nancy. Very expressive! I love the sharp repeated shapes you have employed in the clouds and the beach which brings I sense of design unity to the whole painting. Nicely done.

This new lesson talks about this concept in more detail: https://mypaintingclub.com/lessons/258-The-Dancing-Pine

With all of that impasto paint in the cloud I would want to see thick impasto in the foreground to balance that out as well otherwise the cloud seems to come closer than the foreground.

 

"Expressive Skies" second attempt at the cloud, in acrylics, by Eric Hillmer, Toronto. ON, Canada.

Artist: Eric Hillmer

Hi Eric, the large cloud shape this second attempt is an improvement on the initial one. What's great about it is that it has created a large flat shape for the palm trees to strut their stuff on.

You've done great with the bushes and grasses too.

It does look like you are having trouble creating shapes with soft edges.

With acrylics it is difficult to produce these soft edges once the paint has dried but there are a few things you can do to keep the acrylic paint wet for longer.

1. Use more paint. Big piles of paint on your palette will dry much more slowly.

2. Mist your palette and painting everything few minutes with a fine water spray bottle.

3. Use re-wettable acrylics like Chroma interactive acrylics or Golden Open acrylics.

4. Use a retarder medium to slow the drying time.

5. Plan your colour transitions through big shapes and premix those colours on your palette. If those colours are dissimilar use separate brushes for each colour.

6. If using a stretched canvas on a frame you can spray water on the back of the canvas to extend drying time.

7. Plan each section you are going to paint and execute it quickly.

I hope that helps.

 

Expressive Skies 11 x 14 Oil on Linen

Artist: Louise Villegas

Some lovely angelic clouds there, Louise! Very uplifting. I almost expected Jesus to be coming around the corner on a donkey. They are particularly gorgeous shapes with a nice variety of soft and hard edges. I like the colour transitions you have from mauves to pinks to yellows which makes them all the more beautiful and interesting. The grasses have come up very well - those fine dark accents add a lot of realism in an elegant way.

The only thing I would like to see different is the palm trees done with a little more panache rather than careful drawing.

Here is a great lesson for painting palm trees: https://mypaintingclub.com/lessons/245-Tropical-Island

 

Expressive Skies after Richard Robinson, 12x12 acrylic on hardboard

Artist: Rachel Chard

Nice work, Rachel. You have executed a very carefully observed painting with good drawing skills and fine colour perception. Your cloud is particularly interesting in all of its subtle transitions and details.

Just a couple of points to think about. You've made the bases your foliage very clear cut against the sand which gives the appearance of the day man made thing, and a bit cut out rather than joined to the sand. To avoid that look simply add some smudgy darkness around the bases and it will look more natural. Secondly, if you are trying to loosen up your painting style I suggest you use much larger brushes. Good job.

 

 

 

Get the full painting lesson here: https://mypaintingclub.com/lessons/257-Expressive-Skies-Back-Lighting