Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Would you like to learn a shortcut to painting watercolor clouds? You can create cumulus clouds with volume and airy beauty by combining watercolor with white gouache and colored pencils.
This is an easy technique where you don’t have to struggle with blue paint around unpainted blotches of white paper. Instead, you can splash out with color and still create beautiful cloud shapes.
In this tutorial, I take you through each step of building clouds with volume using watercolor, white gouache, blue, and light purple colored pencils, as well as a greasy white colored pencil. I use a combination of these tools in most of my illustration work, and if you take a peek at my illustration gallery, you can see many examples of how I use them to create a realistic look.
The cloud tutorial
The photo below of cumulus clouds is a good reference. There is no need to try to replicate these exact clouds; they only serve as a guide to our painting.
Step 1:
Paint some green, yellow, and terracotta to indicate a landscape at the bottom of the paper. Soak up most of the color with a sponge. When dry, paint the rest of the paper with lots of plain water using a thick brush.
Step 2:
Still using a thick brush, spread ultramarine blue by moving the brush in circular motions.
Step 3:
Indicate the shapes of the clouds by soaking up the blue color with a sponge.
Step 4:
When half dry, paint with white gouache on top of the cloud shapes.
Step 5:
Add water to the edges to avoid sharp outlines.
Step 6:
When dry, draw with a light purple pencil around the edges of the clouds and anywhere on top of them to create volume.
Step 7:
Smudge the areas of colored pencil with tissue paper.
Step 8:
Paint the clouds with a second layer of white gouache, again adding water to the edges, and soaking up with a sponge.
Step 9:
The edges around the painting look messy by now, so in order to see the picture clearly, clean up the edges by painting with white gouache on top of the white watercolor tape. If your painting sits within a pencil rectangle, paint with white gouache along the pencil border.
Step 10:
When the paper is dry, draw with a bright blue pencil on and around the clouds, creating more volume in the clouds.
Step11:
Smudge again with tissue paper.
Step 12
Use a hairdryer to warm the paper, then draw with a greasy white colored pencil. When the paper is warm, the oily white color spreads out better. Look at the reference photo and use your imagination to enhance the cloudy look of your painting with the white pencil.
And that’s it!
I used this same technique to create the white area around the falcon in the illustration you see below. In this instance, instead of building cloud volume, I created a soft and smooth transition between the blue and white with the same white gouache and greasy white colored pencil.
List of art supplies you need for this tutorial.