How to paint the sky acrylics

When I was a child, I would look up at the sky and try to pick out shapes created by the big, puffy clouds. Sometimes I’d see a cute rabbit or a turtle, other times it would be a horse rearing up or a dragon with a long spiky tail. Now that I’m grown up and a full-time artist, I’m still mesmerized by them. I often add them to paintings to help create the essence of a scene. I also like to use them as the main subject, as I’ve done in this demonstration.

How to Paint a Sky Using Acrylics

With its ever changing hues and shades, the sky has always been a fascinating subject, especially in art. It sets the mood for a landscape painting, it serves as an essential backdrop for any outdoor portrait, and it never fails to provide a stunning color palette that you just want to capture through painting or photography.

In this article, we’re sharing a tutorial video on how to paint a beautiful skyscape in less than one minute. By the end, you’ll know how to make your skies and clouds look realistic and dreamy at the same time. Once you’ve mastered this skill, you can play around with more colors, be more adventurous with blending and shading, and paint different cloud formations to capture the sky in all its dynamic glory.

Materials needed:

• Chalkola Acrylic Paint (we used Titanium White, Phthalo Blue, and Mars Black)
• Chalkola Painting Canvas Board
• Paint brushes

Ready to paint your sky? Watch the short video below to unlock your skyscape-painting skill!

Steps:

1. Prepare your materials and if you can, use scratch paper or newspaper to cover the surface you’re working on.
2. On your palette, mix Titanium White and Phthalo Blue until you create a sky blue shade.
3. Once you achieve the sky blue shade of your choice, use it to paint the entire surface of your canvas board.
4. Layer the bottom part with Titanium White to achieve a gradient effect.
5. Add Mars Black to the sky blue mixture on your palette to create a bluish gray color. Use this to paint the outline of your clouds.
6. Add a bit of Titanium White on your mixture and paint the second layer of the clouds.
7. Use a small brush to blend the outer corners of the clouds.

Easy, right? Keep practicing and experimenting with different hues and combinations. The sky’s the limit when you’re being creative!

List of Supplies

• Canvas Panel, 12×12 classic
• Acrylic Premium Artist Paint – Titanium White A101, Cobalt Blue A124

Realistic Clouds Step-By-Step

Clouds are some of the easiest subjects to paint from your imagination, but if you’re having trouble envisioning them in your mind, you can go online and see lots of examples to use as a reference. If you’re like me, you might do that at first but soon you’ll be creating your own imaginary ones in different shapes and colours!

Step 1

Dip a large brush into Cobalt Blue A124 and cover the whole canvas with it. For the best results, I use a synthetic brush. Oh, what a beautiful sky!

Step 2

Next, mix Titanium White A101 with water to create a thin wash and make an outline of the arrangement of the clouds. This makes the perfect halftone. Also, I make the top more transparent, so you can see the sky through it while filling in the bottom to make it appear more solid.

Step 3

Real clouds are made up of smaller ones bunched together. To make that happen, I use lightly thinned white paint for these. At the top, I still want some blue sky showing through, so I’m not too heavy-handed there.

What’s really important is to paint the ones at the bottom, which are in the foreground, closer to us, and a brighter white. For this part, I get daring and use white paint straight from the tube!

Step 4

For this painting, I imagine sunlight coming from the top left. This helps me place the highlights in the right place. I use a small brush with white to add a light area on the top of each small cloud. I love how this makes each cloud stand out.

Throughout this process, don’t forget that the closer the cloud is to the viewer, the thicker the layer of paint you should use. The highlights at the top won’t be as thick as the ones at the bottom.

Step 5

To pump up the volume of these puffy clouds, I need to create contrast in the foreground. So, I apply Cobalt Blue A124 under them to make shadows. To create the strongest contrast I can, I place dark shades next to lighter ones with a clear edge between the two.

These may be some of my best yet! They look so puffy and remind me of a beautiful summer day. Your thoughts?

Recommendations

• To get the most out of this demonstration, do not skip any of the steps. It might be tempting to jump from the first step to the last, but each step builds on the one before. If you follow each one you’ll get that realistic look you’re going for.
• Don’t worry about making mistakes. The best thing about acrylic paints is that they are thick and opaque enough to cover any changes you want to make. So, go ahead and be brave! If you don’t like something, just paint over it!
• Always wash your brushes really well with soap and water after you’re finished using them. If you allow the paint to dry on your brushes they will never come clean and will be ruined forever.

Now that you’ve got the steps for cloud paintings, it’s time to paint them. They come in so many sizes, shapes, and colours, you really can’t make a mistake. Try painting those pink and lavender ones you see when the sun rises in the morning or the red and orange clouds at sunset. Or, better yet, create your own custom colours and add a new atmosphere to your art! I hope you’ll leave me a comment about your experiences painting clouds. I’d love to hear about your adventures in cloud painting.

Painting a Sky in Acrylics

So I wanted to share with you the method I used to create a really nice blurred background sky in acrylics. The painting that this was for actually only contains texture for the main focus of the artwork – the seagull. I wanted to create the seagull as raised on its own with the sky a kind of abstract idea in the background.

So after cutting out a template for the seagull and applying the texture using my own homemade texture mix, I allowed the texture to dry overnight. After sanding off the edges and creating a smooth line where it met the canvas, I then proceeded to paint the sky.

The colours I used for this were mainly white but also with a small amount of cerulean blue hue, some pale umber and some naples yellow. However, the main amount of paint was white as you do not need much of the other colours to create a nice sky.

Firstly I painted on a base coat of white with a bit of the naples yellow and pale umber mixed in (only drops of those 2 colours so that you just had a kind of cream colour). After painting over the whole canvas I left this to dry. I then added a second coat of a slightly watered down mix of the same paints, plus hint of the blue, just to give it some more depth.

Anyway, it was the last coat that was the most important and gave the kind of abstract, distant effect. Paint (all 4 colours) was added on very loosely mixed by a kind of rough, scuffing motion. I tried to make it as random as I could and used the end of the brush to almost try and push the paint into the canvas. I painted the whole of the sky and then left the paint to dry for a minute to the point where it was not quite dry. I then used a dry sponge (the kind you use to wash the dishes!) to blur all the paint together. Leaving it until it was almost dry meant that I wasn’t just rubbing the paint off but instead blurring it together. I then made sure that the textured seagull itself was pretty much white as it’s base coat and did not have too much of the other colours on before waiting for the sky to dry and painting it.