Expressive Skies - Back Lighting

Many landscape paintings miss this key ingredient

Your next step to enhancing your paintings with expressive skies

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

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 that beautiful sky gradation.

Back Lighting

When objects are between you and the sun, that's back lighting. Objects are mainly in shadow, casting shadows towards you, and some objects such as clouds and flora will have rim-lighting around their edges. The sky will tend to show a strong gradation from light warm closer to the sun to cool dark further away from the sun.

Sky

The sky gradation is the first building block and we'll be 'painting into a couch', which means painting into a wet layer of white paint. You can add more warmth into the sky gradation to enhance the feel of the sunset light. You can also add more vibrancy to the sky simply by adding more colour.

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. 

Rocks in shadow

Using a large synthetic flat brush you can create beautifully crisp, straight edges - perfect for rocks. You'll find that if you add too much light into the shadows it will ruin the illusion, but you can always paint the shadow back in. 

Wet Sand

Using that same big flat brush you'll add a soft foreground shadow first which will help draw the eye into the centre. Crisp shapes of shadow and light add more form and lead us to the towering clouds.

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!