Teacher
Richard is a talented full time artist, who loves painting and teaching.
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!
