Exercise: drawing clouds

When I told my grand-daughter I was learning to draw clouds, she said "They're easy, Grandad, I'll show you."

Like her, I thought clouds would be easy to draw, but it's far from the case; trying to capture the shape, texture and colour of clouds has been very challenging, especially with the limited colour palette of a pencil box.

I knew that John Constable is credited with being one of the first artists to really draw clouds from life and so I looked at some of his work for inspiration.

This sketch of his shows how he managed to capture the shape and different tones of a cloud in a very short space of time. The result is almost like a painting-by-numbers approach with just three or four different pencil patterns to represent different tones.



I tried a similar approach with a couple of early efforts, with a sky filled with wispy clouds:

Since clouds move and change quite fast, I took a series of photographs, and then tried to convey some puffy cumulo nimbus clouds, using the same approach as Constable, with pencil:

Finding it rather hard to get any real sense of clouds just in pencil, I moved on to using colour mixing a variety of media including oil pastels, pastel pencils and even watercolour pencils.

This was the result, first scanned as a b/w image:

And then in colour. I used pastel pencils, then graphite pencils, then some oil pastels to get some of the difficult colours. Clouds tend to be quite a flat grey, but with a bluish/purplish tinge.

On the whole this has been a difficult, but illuminating experience. I have to say I pay much closer attention to clouds now. I've realised that they change radically depending on time of day and the position of the sun. With the sun behind them, the clouds appear dark, with bright white edges; near dusk, the sun shines below the clouds creating the typical 'red sky' effect, with the shadows on top of the clouds.