Painting with a sky or bedroom murals often add clouds.
White clouds are painted into a variety of artworks that range from a home's wall or ceiling to paintings of clear blue skies or sunsets. The use of white clouds differs dramatically between home painting projects and art, but the techniques used to make fluffy, realistic white clouds are similar for any painting project.
Instructions
1. Obtain reference pictures of preferred cloud types. Clouds range from fluffy-looking cumulous clouds to spread-out and blanketing stratus clouds to wispy cirrus clouds. Select the type of cloud preferred for the painting project and look at reference pictures. Note the cloud shape, color enhancement and potential backgrounds.
2. Prepare the canvas or wall according to the specific paint and paint needs. Canvas is usually made ready to paint, but some are stretched before painting and might need some preparation work before painting. Stretching canvas require getting a painting frame, which is usually a wooden frame, pulling the canvas tight around the frame and securing the canvas to the frame, often with staples. Walls usually require putting down a primer before painting to prevent other paints from showing through the clouds.
3. Paint the background. The background can differ from sunsets to bright blue skies as preferred. Exact painting methods differ on preferred painting styles, but usually background paint uses a 1-inch paintbrush and long back-and-forth or up-and-down strokes that quickly cover the canvas. Smaller paintings might use a half-inch or smaller paintbrush as appropriate for the canvas. When painting strokes, select a direction and paint the entire canvas in the same direction such as up and down.
4. Paint the clouds on the background directly while it is still wet. Painting over the background paint will naturally incorporate the colors used in the background to get white clouds that look three dimensional. Start with small amounts out white paint and shape in the preferred cloud shape. Typically, circular or swirling patterns form the cloud shapes. The still-wet background paint will make the colors blue or shot through with pinks, oranges and reds for a sunset view. The white paint will blend naturally with the wet background paint to create lighter and circular shapes within the darker background.
5. Add some more white paint and work in the cloud shapes gradually. Add lighter and lighter white paint in similar shapes around the canvas or wall so that it gradually lightens in highlights. Lessen the spread of paint while adding more white color so that it highlights areas while leaving clouds with natural color underneath and around.
