The Sky and Above: Learn to Paint Cirrocumulus Clouds!

Basically, if you wanted to create a clear and blue atmosphere, you will be looking at painting these clouds.

At 16000 to 40000 feet, appearance wise, these are small clouds due to the perspective of the higher altitudes. Furthermore, these clouds clump up together to form a unique pattern.

While you probably won’t paint a lot of cirrocumulus clouds, as these clouds are very short lived, there are a few new techniques that can be learned from this exercise.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

1. Setting up perspective

As we are reaching higher altitudes, we are approaching areas just before the darkness of space. In these skies above, we will need to create a dark blue hue to work with.

Personally, I would grab a blue to dark blue gradient. The darker the blue hues are, the higher the atmosphere will appear to be.

With the perspective diagrams that you have learned about, create just a simple two point perspective grid on a separate layer. This will be your guide lines to help you with creating the clouds.

Before you begin to paint cirrocumulus clouds, take a second and think of which guide lines you will use. Believe me, this will be very helpful because you will need to play how to paint all those small clouds are it reaches the horizon!

2. The first few patches

This step will take advantage of your tablet’s sensitivity options. First, pick a round brush that has a soft edge. You want to make sure the pressure sensitivity is set on hard. I recommend about 50% or above.

Then, make sure your digital art program sets the tablet’s pressure to increase or decrease the size of the brush.

After the settings are in place, start up a new layer and begin to pain cirrocumulus clouds!

The important thing here is to focus on the perspective. Begin with heavy pushes on the digital stylus. However, the closer you move towards the horizon, lower the pressure accordingly to create smaller patches of clouds.

3. Multiplying the effect

Remember how I asked you to paint the clouds on a separate layer? Well, we are going to duplicate that layer and manipulate it.

With your digital art program, copy and paste the initial cloud layer. Then, use any transformation tools and options that are available. For example, skew, distort, scale, warp, perspective transformations, and rotate are common transformation options.

Use these to your advantage!

As you transform the layers, continue to duplicate and manipulate it in a fashion so it follows the perspective guide lines. You need to repeat the step to cover up your atmosphere.

Merge layers as necessary and repeat the process. Personally, I like the scale function as it allows me to shrink and expand the layers horizontally or vertically. This is important as the patches of clouds gets closer to the horizon.

4. Repainting

Once you think you have a good coverage area of these clouds, the next step is to improve the overall effect. With the layers that you have, you may want to blur or smudge the edges.

Moreover, think about adjusting the opacity of the different layers. That is, less opacity means that it will merge with the background better. This is useful for clouds that are in the background.

Once that’s done, you should merge the layers together and start repainting areas of light. With your new composition, it should be easier to see the entire sky as a whole.

All that is left is to use whatever tools you have learned and feel comfortable using. Some suggestions are the smudge brushes to smudge the edges, a simple round digital brush to recolor certain areas, dodge and burn tools for highlights, and the various blend modes you have learned to cover up larger areas.

Learning to paint cirrocumulus clouds require a lot of patience as you are applying everything you know thus far.

It’s not easy, but keep up the good work and you will go far!

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