Learning to paint clouds

I made a commitment to try to learn how to paint clouds this winter. I'd like to get to the point where I know them well enough to be able to invent realistic looking clouds. My goal is to finish ten small cloud paintings. I've just finished my third and have started my fourth. I forgot to put the first two up here, so here they are. Both are of Spring clouds in the Columbia Gorge, looking north from the Oregon side of the Columbia River, in the vicinity of Tom McCall Preserve, west of Hood River.

It's all about the Composition

Goat Mountain Sunset

I've spent an awful lot of years learning to get the colors I want in a painting, and I'm getting good enough results now—not necessarily easily, but eventually—so it's time to get on to the next part of learning to paint: the paramount importance of composition, and how to create a good one. I take thousands of photos a year, and maybe 1% of them I recognize instantly as having a great composition. I've watched other people do value studies, and I've done some myself, but only a couple days ago, as I was contemplating what to paint next, I finally understood that it's during the value study that you adjust the composition until it acquires what it needs to attract attention. I always end up trying to fix the composition in the last third or less of the painting process, because I've been so focused the whole time on getting the colors right.

I frequently repeat the saying I read long ago, that "Painting isn't hard—you just have to get the right colors in the right places." So I was focusing on the right colors; now it's time to focus on the right placing.

I did a monotone value study for this last painting as the first stage, and I think it's been this experience that's made me fully absorb the process, and be able to think about it clearly. The study looked like this:

Then when I started painting over it, I first went with a blue violet palette, looking for something dramatic.

I decided I didn't really like that, and shifted more towards aqua hues, as I kept reworking the shapes and adding details, until I had the underpainting finalized.

And then I finished it, using a new trick to make sure I was capturing the composition that attracted me to the photo in the first place. I like to use my iPad as my color source now, but looking at an image that large (anything bigger than 5" on the short side) makes it really difficult to see the larger shapes—my brain just gets lost in the detail. So I print up a small image of the reference, no more than 4" on the long side, and tape it to the easel post right above the painting. When I stand back 8-10', I can easily compare the shapes in the painting to the shapes in the photo, and see how to fix things if I've gone wrong. Ta-da!

This view is not in the Columbia Gorge, it's from near Cornelius, at the edge of the coastal range.