The Sky and Above: Learn to Paint Cirrus Clouds!

Appearance wise, these clouds resemble wisplike strands in the sky. As well, you will see these clouds under a few conditions, though not limited to: after a thunderstorm, accompanying hurricanes/tornados, and aircraft trails.

With these ideas in mind, it does paint a good idea of what these clouds look like and what kind of atmosphere it can create in your paintings.

So without further ado, let’s begin to paint cirrus clouds!

1. Setting the backdrop

As normal, we would need a background that has the colors we need to paint cirrus clouds. I recommend a nice gradient of blue. Whatever is closer to the horizon should be a lighter shade of blue.

After that, we will need our trusty perspective grid. I recommend the two-point perspective system just to keep things simple. Adjust as much as you need to cover your digital canvas.

Now, this perspective grid should be on another layer. The reason is that you will be switching the grid on and off for visibility reasons.

2. Painting swirls

Now that we have our guide lines set up as well as our backdrop, the next step is to start painting the general shapes. There are two tools that will be used a lot in this step: the brush tool and the smudge tool.

With the brush tool, use a low opacity setting along with a splatter type brush head and begin to paint lightly. With each stroke, try to vary the different types of swirls. Of course, you can paint straight lines if you like.

Make sure to adjust the brush sizes as you reach near the horizon or creating flares in the larger cloud shapes.

Once that is done, you will switch over to the smudge tool. Continue with the splatter type brush heads and smudge it accordingly. The splatter heads will give you that thread-like appearance.

3. Adding mass

Since these clouds are on a separate layer, it will doge or burn the colors correctly as there are no underlying colors for the tool to choose from.

So, we are doing to do a few things here. First, I need you to duplicate the cloud layer and the background color layer a few times. Then, with the duplicated layers, merge it together so you have one complete layer with the blue background and the clouds.

Once you have this layer merged, begin to paint cirrus clouds with the dodge and burn tools.

As it is all in one layer, it becomes easier for the tool to function properly. Bring out clouds in the foreground by using the dodge tool. Use the burn tool to fade clouds that are in the background to give it a sense of distance.

We’re almost done!

4. Final steps

Now that you have a complete painting of the clouds, the next order of business is to emphasis what’s already there. You should still have the clouds and the background layers as separate layers as you duplicated it several times in step three.

With these three layers (the cloud layer, the background color layer, and the merged layers that contain both background and clouds), you can begin to manipulate how the effects work.

For example, you can duplicate the layer that has been merged into another layer. Then, choose overlay to get a nice bright color. With the separate cloud layers, change the opacity or the blending modes to get a faded effect.

You can even use the scale/perspective function, or the blur filters, on each corresponding layers to create a sense of motion.

In essence, this lesson starts to use some of the internal functions of your digital art program to help speed up or help generate a needed effect on a digital canvas. But remember, it cannot replace the fact that you need to paint it out manually.

Of course, merge some of the layers and repaint everything if necessary.

In the end, there’s still no replacement for the ability to paint it out on your own as that’s where most of the learning comes from!

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Return from Paint Cirrus Clouds to the 2d Digital Art Guide.