The Sky and Above: Learn to Paint Stratocumulus Clouds!

Characterized by large dark masses, these clouds can exist in groups of lines or waves. Moreover, since stratocumulus clouds hover at less than 8000 feet, you will see these clouds in most digital art paintings.

Probably the only time that you will see these types of clouds is after a bad weather phenomenon has occurred.

This has great implications for when you want to paint a dramatic scene outlining the “calm before/after the storm.”

1. Setting up the background

Before we paint stratocumulus clouds, we need to know what kinds of weather patterns will occur before these clouds exist.

As stated before, since these clouds come before and after a storm, it is easy to assume that there is fair weather as the background. That means you will need a nice blue gradient to start things off.

Use your gradient tool and create a light to dark blue gradient as the background.

As for the clouds, it can be draw simply with a dark brush painting random dark patches on top of your blue gradient on a separate layer. To make it more random, use the eraser tool and create ‘holes’ in these dark patches.

2. Creating light

Since you painted the random grey blotches on a separate layer, you can preserve its transparency. This means you can paint over the shape without wrecking the overall structure.

With the transparency turned on, paint white spots near the border of the shapes. These are where the light will hit the clouds.

Depending on your light source, some edges are brighter than others.

You don’t have to be exact. However, you do have to experiment, as the point of this step is to find out where the light will hit the clouds.

3. Gradient harmony

To create the proper color balance, you will need to blend the colors together. There are two ways of doing this: choosing the smudge tool and blurring each of the clouds manually, or to use a filter technique.

With the transparency option still on, go to your digital art program’s filter or effects options. Look around. There will be an option to blur the current selection.

Once you have created a uniform color structure, the next stop is to refine the clouds.

For this stage, you can either choose the regular brush tool or the dodge tool. The purpose is to refine the cloud shapes further. Begin painting short curved lines around the outside of the clouds.

Make sure to use the overall curvature of each blotch as your guide.

4. Multiplying the effect

The last part is to duplicate the clouds. When I paint stratocumulus clouds, I use the previous layers as a shortcut to creating a more elaborate sky and to save time.

In essence, I took my clouds layer and duplicated it on a new layer. From there, I manipulate the new layer to create more of the same clouds.

I repeat the process until I get something I like. I then merge the layers together and repeat the process over again.

Some effects you can do is flipping the clouds vertically or horizontally, scaling its size, manipulating the colors, erasing the edges, etc.

Obviously, if you do this too much, it’ll look very artificial. This is why you still need to paint some of the clouds by hand. In essence, the duplication of the layers is a means to find random cloud configurations.

Once these configurations are found, you still need to combine these formations by painting the cloud connections manually.

Also play around with layer opacity to make clouds in the distance blend in with the rest of the background.

Regardless, the lesson here is that there is a lot of user input. Remember, you are in control of your learning, your techniques, and ultimately, your painting!

Keep up the good work and the motivation to continue!

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