PAINTING STORM CLOUDS - BLOCKING IN, LAYERING COLORS, ADDING DETAILS, FINISHING THE LANDSCAPE

Hey guys, in this video I walk you through this

painting

. It's about two hours of real-time footage when I'm working in acrylic, so it will be acrylic at first. I have a little time here. lapse tutorial at the end of this video when I wrap it with oil paints, but this first couple of hours of acrylic should give you a good understanding of how I make a

painting

like this and how to get it to a point where you know you can add the

finishing

touches and

finishing

it off, whether with oils or acrylics, so I hope this helps anyone who wants to paint some

clouds

.

Remember if you have questions, let me know. So, the

colors

I'm going to use. that I will be using and all the materials, brushes and mediums that I will have in the description below so as always if you are wondering what I am using check out below the video but I will be using acrylic paints and I have titanium white cadmium orange phthalo blue green tone this is Liquitex icing medium. It simply allows me to thin the paint without compromising its binding properties and I like the way it creates clear layers. It's good for icing. I also have quinacridone magenta cad red cad yellow and charcoal black, so I think I'm going to start with this square brush, this flat brush here and I'm going to block this paint starting with the sky and the color of the sky will be white, a little bit blue and black so essentially we're creating a blueish gray like a silver gray and I'm going to add a little bit of medium to that so pick a little bit more blue and a little bit more black it's going to get a little bit darker at some point in that line, I think I could even take a little bit more black to darken this, okay, somewhere out there and this sketch that I have, you can kind of see, I think it will make sense, but you can see we have a big old cloud. here and in some of the darker areas of the

clouds

, the horizon line is a little bit lower here, so essentially we have some highlights here.

I just shaded this very lightly and I think I'll just go with it, you'll see as I go how it makes sense, but the values ​​aren't quite right in this sketch. I just want to know where everything is and I want to give myself a little. I have an idea regarding the value, so I lightly shaded some areas to let me know, but that's all tentatively going to change here, so the first thing I want to do is cover the canvas, but I want to make sure that I have a pretty accurate color first. I'm not going to start with very bold

colors

, it will probably be much lighter and less saturated than you know what the final result will be, but I want its tone. to be somewhat correct, to me that sky is pretty accurate in terms of the color tone, you know, it's not too green, it's not too magenta, yellow or blue, it's just a nice neutral blue color, so I'm going to set that there like this and I'll probably just wash my brush so I've got some jars of water on the side and I pick up a little bit of white so I've got a little bit of water on my brush but I'm going to add a little bit of medium to that and take a bit of orange with a hint of magenta and essentially get a bit more orange as I want to create a dull reddish orange so I'm going to take a bit of red as well, I think it might be too dark, lighten it a bit more. red and orange, so that's kind of what I was going for, I think that's a good starting point and at the end of this, I'm just going to take my fingers and combine them with what we already have and I'm going to take that same thing. color and how to start introducing that into the cloud itself, I guess it's all cloud except the focal point of the cloud, so you have a few different types of clouds, some nice soft clouds and then of course this will be a lot more defined, okay? something like this is a good start from there.

You can probably go ahead and take a little more red and add it to the mix with a little black to get more white, black and red. I'm going to start

layering

that. under this orange, that orange is still kind of wet, so I can mix it again. The main thing here is to cover it. The next thing I think I can do is take a little bit more black and white and essentially turn this into a more gray mix, but a little bit darker and I could even take a little bit of blue, get more a little bit of magenta and get a tone a little bit more blueish for the darker shadows here and I want to start painting the idea of ​​some darker shadows underneath here and then. a little bit more of that red I'll pick it up, it'll be pretty dark down there, so I might even go ahead and block it all in now, none of this has to be perfect, it won't stay as it is, I mean.

I can, I'm going to add a lot of changes to this, so at this point I just want the idea of ​​what's happening to establish, darken those shadows over here, okay, not bad, I'm going to wash that brush. and I'm going to take an angled brush here, kind of a little dagger shaped brush, just a flat angled brush, I'm going to take a little bit of white with a hint of orange, I've got a little bit of medium in there, mix that in and that's it. . go ahead and cover the top of this cloud and you could even apply a little bit of this color to the surrounding areas just brighten a little bit of this okay, not a bad start, not a bad start at all, you can see what I'm going for . and that's really the goal here, since I'm

blocking

, I just want to be able to visualize, but you don't need to type anything, so once that's done, I'm going to go ahead and block the bottom here and create.

To do that, I'll probably just take a little bit of black, yellow, I could even mix it directly with this over a here, more black than yellow. I don't want too much yellow, maybe even a little more white, that could be about the color, so I'm going to go ahead and wash the brush I started with, it's a little bigger and might even take a little more this steel blue color, it might be too dark, we'll cross that bridge later, I just want to cover a little bit of paint though. here take some medium black, yellow, some white, some blue, it doesn't need to be perfect and we'll take a little bit of this orange color, pass that over here, which will be the stream, just go ahead and cover all of that, it's a colour. that's going to be pretty close to what I'm looking for, so it's not really that important, close enough, so essentially we have a blocked painting.

I'm going to go ahead and let this dry for about 20 minutes and I'll just continue from here and move on to the next step. The next thing I think I'm going to do is basically start working my way back through this piece and try to get each color. a little more precise a little closer to the result I'm looking for but I'm not going to try to do this with one more layer. I'll probably add another layer or two after this, but one thing I would do What I want to do first is set my color along the horizon here just a little bit more.

I wish I could visualize this and right now I feel like this darker foreground doesn't really do much for me. to see and imagine so I would like there to be some highlights on this land here and I think one place I could at least start is just a little bit of grass color so all I have here is a little bit of yellow, a little bit of white, a little bit of black and a touch of blue and I'm just going to add a little bit of green grass so at least this gives me something to look at.

I'm going to work mainly on clouds from now on. And it felt like there just wasn't enough there, I guess to look at, so a little bit of highlighting here hopefully helps me see what I'm looking for, just a different color and behind. that grass gets a little bit dark, which doesn't look quite right, so what I would like to do is create a lighter horizon, maybe more blueish, create that sense of atmosphere, like a blue-gray, I could probably mix in a little bit of that green. too, but I would also like it to be darker than the horizon, so potentially something like this I think is a little bit more of an accurate color scheme for the horizon to fit what I'm looking for and what I'm trying to do, yeah.

I like this so I can already see that as I cover that dark area it looks a lot better so there we go you can see the difference that just

adding

a lighter blue color made you know as we zoom out into the distance . of things start to appear more blue, more atmosphere between the objects and that's what I did here and then, it will fade more into some color and I would like there to be some grass, but again, it's just tentative at this point. At least it looks more believable at this point I think, so I'll stick with that and then move on to probably the blue sky right now, so with that blue sky let's pick up where we left off, a blue gray and I think I can get away with that. with a touch of orange here, a little more white, a touch more orange.

I think I have something that will work here, so warm that color up more than it was by

adding

that orange and I'm just going to try it. Fill this sky with a more solid color to make it a little more deliberate, it's a nice nice sky color, easy on the eyes, not too blue, a little bit of color though, and this layer will really start to cover things completely, okay now before I get to the cloud itself, that's what you know, sticking out in this blue sky. I'd like the blue sky, the blue, to dry up, so I'm going to skip now once I lay down in that sky and I'm probably going to work on something. on the lower side of this horizon here, just below the clouds below this shadow line, I would like to lift it up so we can see below this big cloud here, so let's try to find that color again and just brighten it, I think that might affect very much the feeling of this piece again.

I'm only loosely following some of the references I took, so I'm trying to take it slow, I'm trying to be careful with each one. Move here because I would like to get it right as quickly as possible. As fast as you can. I don't want to make too many mistakes here, so I have some black, some white, and then orange and red. I'm thinking maybe it has a little more magenta in it. You probably just want to make it darker, maybe more red. Red will give you more of a non-violet, not violet color feel, more of an orange feel.

Go ahead and try that, let me take a middle ground with this which feels pretty good for now, I'll probably stick with this and see what it does for me so cover this carefully, nothing fancy, just block and reblock on this . part again, I think that's helping a little bit, but I've definitely lost some definition that I'd like to get back, so I'm going to take a little bit of black and a little bit of blue and see if I can't, I don't know, I'll see if I can't. unite the horizon and the sky more. I feel like that separated the horizon and the sky too much.

I'd like to try to blend all of that together to make it look like it really fits together, so maybe I'll lighten it up. If it gets too high, I'm going to darken it down here and maybe not even darken it that much, but maybe take away some of the color, just like the horizon down below got bluer, I think the sky might get bluer and lose some of the color. color too and maybe something closer to that. I think it looks pretty good from here. What I could probably do is make the shadows at the bottom of this cloud darker, maybe just more blue, so I'm going to add some of this, some of this blue color here a little bit more blue than what I already have.

I just applied it now. I don't really know quite what I'm doing here in terms of, do you know why I'm doing it? What I'm doing as to where each brush stroke goes. I'm just playing with it to see if I can't find something I like, so you see me, I'm just trying a few different things right now. if something hits me, that's the process I go through when I make something like these clouds, you know, I like, I like to make up my clouds as I go as much as I can and guess. On a smaller scale, what that means is that you just have to start moving the paint around and see if something looks good, something will emerge that catches your eye and is therefore pretty good.

I like, I don't like how this lower area is. As a single piece, I would like there to be some sort of separation here and I think what it probably could be is that maybe there are more reflections further down or maybe we can see through some of this into some distant clouds. wash the brush maybe I can take some orange and red some white more orange than red well maybe maybe I lied maybe I would like more pink more like a rosy pinkish orange so something like that maybe and what I would like to do is to create some of these clouds that are a little bit further away in the distance and are appearing underneath down here, that's a good start, so this step here is just to set things up as close to the finished product as possible, but still not focusing really in.

The

details

and specific things can still change. I guess I'm just trying to make the colors as accurate as possible, just like I did down here in the foreground, that really worked out well for me. I added some green. the blue and it really clicked and looks good now I'm starting to have trouble with the

details

of how things will look up in the sky, especially down, and how I'm going to connect that to the horizon and so I try something like thatTheredifferent ideas here, you know, not everything will look good at first. I'm going to have to keep working on it, I'll probably take a little bit more of this gray mix, some magenta, so while I have this. color, I think I could get away with some of this a little higher, so maybe let's forget about that lower area and start moving to other areas, so this is taking my own advice, I think I've given a lot in The past was keep moving, keep moving.

I can come back to this. I'm not too excited about going down into the sky, so I can keep moving to other areas, grab some white and some Orange a little yellow. I know a lot of this cloud across this central area won't be as white, it'll have more color. , so I'm going to start adding some of that color, especially here on the left, so now. I'm not really trying to define the outline and shape of the cloud, but more, I'm just trying to correct the color, trying to bring that color in a little bit closer, okay, so it looks pretty.

Well, it's very sloppy, but that color is what I'm looking for and the color is getting close, so again, this is like the ugly phase of trying to correct the color, but I don't care about the details, so you know it can be seen rough. They look a little mixed up, but you know, I'm starting to be able to see things more clearly as the color becomes more accurate, so that's what I'm focusing on and I think this is a good point to take another break. I might even work a little bit more on another painting that I have and just let this dry, you know, let it reflect and think about it, but when I look at it as a whole, I can really see what the color is like. the horizon starting to make sense the color of the horizon starts to feel a little better, more accurate to me, it looks more realistic, especially you know, as it fades into the foreground and then even to the left in the sky, those start blues that I add. to make a little more sense to me, it gives it that atmospheric look, so as we get back to that horizon, I want it to start turning blue like we did, but then I start to realize that in the sky it needs being more Blue in the sky back there I added a little bit of that and I like this area of ​​the painting.

I like the color. I like the color of the blue sky and I like the color of the cloud as it begins to take shape. So it's a good time to take a step back, think about what's going on here and then I think I'll have a fresh and clear mind when I approach it again, so maybe I'll take a little break, but just get back to it. and we're back, so I have to be honest, it's been about three weeks since I last worked on this painting, so the break I was taking turned into a longer break.

I had other things to work on. so I don't know where I left it. I think I was about to start on a second coat of paint, so it looks like I already have a base coat, so I'm going to move on. and start again with the second layer and I'm going to start with this sky blue up here and to start with that I think I'm going to take a little bit of white and blue, I'm going to take a little bit of orange, a little bit of magenta, maybe a little bit more orange, a little more blue. and yellow maybe and I'm going to try to make it not as blue as what's already there, it's more gray, a warmer tone and I'm going to try to mix these oranges below and the blues above with this color. that I would say is pretty much in the middle, it gives that depth distance effect in the painting, so as the blue sky gets further away it starts to fade in color, so you can see right away that it has a little more sense.

So the bottom of this sky fades out a little bit like this, for this layer I'm still not going to be too worried about the details all I'm worried about is getting the composition exactly how I want and making it. Make sure all the colors are as accurate as possible and then you go up and clean them up with a third layer or add more highlights and shadows. I'm going to switch to this angle brush here, a flat angle brush a little bit of medium, let's start with a little bit of white and give it a touch of orange, touch a yellow, I still want this to be more yellow than orange, so take a little more yellow and add it to the mix, so I'm going to slightly reshape this cloud, here I'm going to work on these. highlights a little bit more orange now there's just a little touch of magenta, a little bit more highlight here, so I'm applying these colors a little more precise, like I'm one step closer, take a little bit of this gray that I have and I'm going to use it, I'm just going to fan that edge slightly, okay, this time I'm going to add a little bit more magenta, a little bit more water, a little bit of orange on this I like this color too, it's definitely more precise, so it'll show through.

You know, I think it looks a little strange right now. It doesn't really all fit, but there is still a touch of black, but I think it will. I think you are on the right track. Anyway, work on some of these shadows. Develop the idea of ​​You know what the exact shape of this is, it's a little bit black, so we have a kind of purple that we're mixing and adding a little bit of blue to this now, so I'm taking this in steps, I'm not looking to complete this as I just said. However, I'm just looking to get one step closer, I know I always say that but that's how I think about things, just go step by step, so these colors help me see the end result more than I already can.

I think some of these darker shadows are bothering me a little. This color I'm adding right now. This more violet color. It's just not that strong. That's for sure. Alright. It looks pretty good. I would have to do it. I think I can add a little bit more here, so this is a good kind of in-between color, like a purple color, and I think it's going to help blend these orange and pink tones into these darker shadows, so it's all about when. I got to this step, I think it's about trying to find those in-between tones.

You know what's in between and if you can use that to smooth out different transitions or tie together things of different colors, I think it can really help you speed up. speeding up the process, making it much more fluid, creating a more precise painting, I don't know, that's one of the things I'm trying to do at this point,

blocking

in intermediate colors in stages, like putting in two or three colors. the two or three four main colors and then you know, you basically double what you're looking for, you know, more middle tones, try to cut those colors in half in two, maybe you know if you go from a white to a black, mix two. different gray colors, a light gray and a dark gray, you can really start to soften things and blend them how you want them to be okay, yeah, I'm seeing I think I'm going to take a step back on this for a second and let's see if I can Determine if I'm ready to continue with this or if I need to make another modification.

I don't know, but we'll be back in a few minutes, so one of the things. I've been looking at this area just over here in the sky and I think I could probably break through these clouds here. I think I have too many clouds, too many, too many, like a symmetrical feeling between the horizon, the clouds and In the sky I want to break up some of these pink areas, so I'm going to mix a little bit of black with a touch of blue and I also have some pinkish orange, so I'll try to come up with something like that. this gray color that I had before, touch more blue there, I think it's going to work pretty well, so we're going to try to break this up somewhere around here, very thin paint, it's going on nice and smooth, this is nothing more.

Instead of kind of a wash of color, you can add a little bit more white, so I want to leave a little bit of cloud here, but I think I want it to be lighter than the sky, so I'm going to take a little bit of white, probably a little. of this kind of pinkish orange color but more white okay something lighter or brighter like this so okay it looks pretty good I'm going to take a little bit more medium I'm going to open up a little bit of this color to see the right here. I'm going to add something of the same color right now.

The next thing I'm going to do here is mix some of that blue up in the sky again, white, black, some blue that's pretty close that I'm going to use. This around the edge of my cloud and I'm trying to sharpen those edges, so we want to give this cloud some clean, sharp edges and use my finger to blur some of these areas. You see how, as I sharpen it, it really starts. To make it look more attractive, okay, I like it, I'll just study it a little bit. I'm going to go back to some of these lighter colors that I have in the blue sky and do something here.

Still, with these clouds, that's what I'm going to try to do. Basically, I'm just thinking about this. I want to open up a little bit of sky under this cloud, so it's very thin, but these paints will cover very well. So I'm not looking for sharp edges, not really yet, so we'll make them nice and smooth because I may think they need to be changed here later, but this will just give me an idea. I can look at it and if I decide that's what I want to keep, I'll fine-tune it later, so I'll hang back, take a look, yeah, I think it's starting to be more of what I had in mind.

I still don't think the color is too low, maybe just lighten it, maybe give it a wash of some color, a little bit darker, yeah, I like that there should be some color at the bottom, in the sky, like that. Now I'm going to wash a little bit of color over the top of that blue, I think that helps the black and the blue a little bit with a little bit of magenta and it's mixing with some of the white that I already have on the palette, a little bit more blue on that. so I just took a little bit of blue, added a little bit of white, more black, to get there, maybe a little bit more magenta, warm it up, so it looks pretty good, so this is a darker color.

I'm going to darken some of the lower parts of these clouds just by washing this color. So yeah, I think it looks a little better. I'm going to mix in a kind of dirty burnt orange similar to what I already have there but similar to this color down here. I'll just rub a little bit to the right to do everything. of that down there is the same color, so I think it looks better and there might be a couple more fixes I want to make, so this is kind of a shadow color again. I'm just going to bring the shadow of this cloud further down. here it softens a couple of these edges down, so this is like an in-between color again, so we have kind of a mix of this blue, some of these more neutral tones I also like so far, I'll probably keep it for now and I'm going to move to the top edge of these clouds now so there will be some orange, magenta and white, forgive me if I'm moving too fast, especially when mixing colors, sometimes it's hard to concentrate on both the painting and the camera or video at the same time, but I hope just seeing this helps you.

I know some things can be hard to understand, so leave questions and comments below a little more white and orange, just find the right color here. a little brighter might even mix some of those two together. I'm going to try this mixture that blends a little bit into this top edge. You can see it well. It now has a more natural look as I soften certain ones. edges we want hard edges, but as I soften other edges it starts to make things really work, so you want a nice mix of soft and hard edges when you're painting, maybe complex clouds or skyscapes like this, okay, so this is a really good intermediate color right now, as I move across the canvas, I can wash this color out and it's diluting some of those colors and tones that I already have there, so it makes things look a little bit more aerated, neutralizes it. a lot of colors so when I get a color like this I tend to use it, there's not much left on my brush at the moment but it's enough that if I rub it with foam it will look pretty good.

Alright, that looks pretty good right now, so I'm going to take a quick break and come back in a few moments. Okay, I'm going to work a little bit on the foreground and I'm going to start by taking a little bit of black and a little bit of medium size and I'm going to take a little bit of water. I'm going to soak a little bit of that water into the paper towel, so I'm going to start with a little bit of black and I think I'm going to add a little bit of orange to the black.

I'll see how it works. It creates like a nice dark greenish tone. I'm going to take just a touch of white plus medium and just across the right side here I'm going to start putting in what will appear to be some trees and I apologize. I've switched to a smaller flat brush, this is probably a quarter inch flat brush, maybe a little wider than that, but a nice flat brush gets a nice sharp edge if you want it and I'm using the front edge only to place. some thin pine trees over here, so I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I want to add some perspective to this painting and I think some objects in the middle of this foreground, as well as just working in some of the things closer to the front, will help me with that so I'll probably take this angled brush again and end up darkening the foreground quite a bit. in some areas it turns yellow and kind of a medium blend and I'm just applying this to the bottom of these trees, so I'm starting to think a little more about the actual colors inThe next thing I do is look for those colors in the lower part of the sky and try to add them to the river to have an attractive reflection that you can see. at the base of that river it's a little lighter, so we can start to see the reflection of that bright cloud above.

I'm also breaking up some of the grass on the right side to give it some variety, maybe there's a little bump to the edge of this mud flat and some patches of grass around it, the next thing I start looking for is where to add the details , where to add the shadows, so I have a very small liner brush right here and I've mixed a little bit of black with a little bit of medium and I'm just touching on the idea of ​​some shadows right on the edge of the river bank. I also decided to make the grass a little less green, maybe more brown grass, maybe to indicate. a fall or autumn scene just seemed too green to me it just didn't match the whole theme of the painting and lastly what I start looking for are the reflections in the water so I'm going to start highlighting some of The bottom area down here try give the appearance of that cloud reflecting brightly in the water and maybe also some of those oranges and reds, so I'm just using a liner brush for this.

I'm trying to make each brush stroke really small. It's almost like smearing or pixelating all these little textures in the water just to give the appearance of calm water, but maybe slightly broken, so at this point I'm ready to oil, it's already been dry for a few days so the paint is completely dry to the touch and you can see that when I apply this layer of medium and mineral spirits, it really starts to bring the colors back to life, increases the contrast, all that good stuff, so I oil the paint and then right away I start to add.

A little bit more paint in these same areas, so I want to brighten a couple of low spots in the sky, just more brightness around the cloud formation, the horizon line under the clouds. I wanted it to be a little bluer, maybe a little brighter too. So at this point in this stage you can see that I'm also going to highlight the highlights on the cloud and then maybe add a little bit more color to the cloud, so after oiling is a good time to highlight the highlights on some colors if I want it to be more saturated and make those minor adjustments like the horizon.

If I feel like I need it, this for me is kind of a final coat of paint, I'll paint this and then I can oil it one more time after it dries. and then at that point I'll be ready for a varnish, but this right now is kind of the final coat of the paint and I'm basically doing the same things that I explained in this video, just repeating it, just trying it. So you know more precisely the vision I had, so I spent a lot of time just lighting the reflections in the clouds, as well as lighting the reflections in the lower part of the water and I did that reflection a couple of times. adjustments to the grasses but not to an extreme amount finally the last thing I wanted to do was add a touch of life to this painting tell a story I decided to add a couple of eagles in the distance maybe its vultures I guess it depends on the viewer to decide, but a pair of birds rise above behind in the distance.

I wanted to keep them pretty small and minor in relation to the overall painting but I thought it was a nice touch and then once I sign it it will be complete so here it is. final painting the final result i hope you enjoyed this video i hope it helped you with some of your own painting process as always be sure to ask questions if you have any and be sure to check out my free print giveaway if you like. I would like to support myself more and finally once again. Thank you very much for watching, see you next time.