Painting Clouds

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I avoid clouds whenever possible. I think they often steal attention from the actual subject. A sky is at its best when it does not dominate a painting. Dark skies and clouds can easily become distracting, and it is often better to keep the sky light and free of clouds.

But sometimes clouds are impossible to avoid. They may be an important part of a painting, or simply too beautiful to ignore. There are, of course, several different ways of painting clouds in watercolour. In this article, I will describe three methods that I use when I decide not to avoid them, but actually paint clouds.

One general tip when painting clouds, or other objects with loose shapes, is to avoid pencil drawing. A clearly visible pencil line around a cloud is really not very attractive, or around a tree canopy or a shadow on the ground, for that matter. So, if possible, avoid drawing the clouds and create them with paint and brush instead.

Leaving the Clouds Unpainted

The absolutely simplest way to paint clouds is simply not to paint them. Instead, you paint what surrounds them – the blue sky – leaving the clouds unpainted. This painting method is called negative painting: you create the shape of an object by painting what is behind it.

To succeed with this way of painting, you have to switch something in your brain. Creating a convincing shape without painting the actual object is not necessarily intuitive. You cannot really “cheat” by first painting a line with blue paint and then filling in with more blue paint around it. The risk is that the blue line will dry slightly and form a bloom, or dry as a blue border around the cloud.

Instead, paint the blue sky directly, without a pencil or watercolour outline. If you tilt the brush so far that you are painting with the side of the brush hairs, a nice scumbled edge can appear. This gives the clouds a slightly fuzzy edge that looks pleasant.

Once the blue paint has dried, you can paint a shadow underneath the clouds. Clouds normally have a slightly darker underside.

Wet-in-Wet

The principle is the same as when leaving the clouds unpainted. The difference is that you paint on wet paper. Start by wetting the paper, preferably quite generously. Whether you wet the whole sheet or just the sky depends on the subject. Sometimes you need completely white areas in the foreground, such as snow. But sometimes it is better to wet the entire sheet.

When applying the blue paint, there are three things to keep an eye on:

1. How wet is the paper? It should not be soaking wet.
2. How diluted is the paint? Moderate is best.
3. How much paint is in the brush? Use a moderate amount of paint.

If you want the clouds to have a clearly defined shape, the paper cannot be too wet, otherwise the blue paint will flow too far into the clouds. My recommendation is to wet the paper thoroughly and then allow the water to soak into the paper until the surface becomes matt. This also gives you more time because the paper has become thoroughly wet.

When paint is applied to already wet paper, it will flow out into the wet surface. The paint therefore becomes more diluted and lighter. So keep in mind that the colour you have mixed, and perhaps tested on a test sheet, will appear lighter when painted onto wet paper.

Also try to be sparing with the amount of paint in the brush, and perhaps with the size of the brush as well. A large, well-loaded brush releases a lot of paint when you paint onto wet paper. Do not flood the sky with blue paint, or your clouds may become shapeless or even be painted over completely.

If you have time, you can also add a shadow with a greyish colour to the underside of the clouds, wet-in-wet.

Lifting Out the Clouds

This is by far the easiest method to carry out. You simply lift out the light clouds by removing the sky colour with a piece of kitchen paper.

1. Paint the entire sky with one or more colours.
2. Let the paint dry until the surface is slightly matt.
3. Roll a little kitchen paper into a ball.
4. Place the ball where you want a cloud and press down. Repeat until you have created beautiful clouds.

A sky is almost never an even blue. Most skies are lighter towards the horizon. If you want to create such a sky, dilute the blue paint with water as you paint the sky near the horizon.

Or perhaps you want a sky that is warmer lower down, like a late evening sky. In that case, add the warm colour wet-in-wet towards the bottom of the blue sky.

Once the sky colour is in place, let it dry for a while before you start lifting out the clouds. If you lift out the paint immediately while it is still freshly applied, it will flow back into the clouds. You will then have to lift it out again, and again, until the paint can no longer move.

If you are not careful, drying lines can form around the lifted-out clouds. It is easier to succeed if you let the paint rest until the surface is matt before you start lifting out the clouds.

The kitchen paper will become stained with the blue sky colour. Therefore, you should turn the paper ball occasionally so that a fresh part of the paper is being used. If you use the same part of the paper too many times, it will change from an absorbent ball of paper into a stamp. In that case, you will get blue spots instead of white clouds.

These are three ways of painting clouds in watercolour that I sometimes use. Which method you choose can depend on the technique used for the rest of the painting. Leaving clouds unpainted does not work particularly well if the rest of the painting is detailed and contains a lot of wet-in-wet work. In the same way, you may not want to use wet-in-wet clouds when the rest of the painting is spontaneous and freely painted.

The Importance of the Paper

The paper plays a certain role. Different papers work better or worse with the different techniques. Leaving clouds unpainted works equally well on all papers.

When painting wet-in-wet, you need a paper that is good for fine control with this technique. Some papers produce blooms and unevenness when they are half dry. Papers such as Arches, Baohong, Saunders Waterford and Canson Heritage work very well for this technique.

You may want to avoid papers such as Hahnemühle, Magnani and Lana when fine wet-in-wet transitions are desired. Simple papers containing wood fibres or only partly made from cotton should be avoided altogether unless they are mould made.

There are papers that are good at holding onto a freshly painted area, while other papers make it easy to lift paint. When you lift out paint with kitchen paper, the latter type has a clear advantage.

It is the degree of sizing on the surface and in the paper pulp that determines how easy it is to remove paint. Heavily sized papers make it easy to remove paint, while more absorbent, softly sized papers hold onto the paint better and are therefore not as good for this particular technique.

You can find an approximate list of the sizing of different watercolour papers here: