The Sky and Above: Learn to Paint Stratus Clouds!

These clouds are basically a layer of fog that never hits the ground. Moreover, these clouds are uniform and do not bunch up together. That means it will exist as a monotone color across the landscape with no definite shape.

In terms of painting these clouds, it seems straight forward enough. Basically, just have to set a nice low intensity color and spread it across the digital canvas.

However, that’ll be just too easy!

1. Beginning to paint stratus clouds

We will start off easy by creating simple stratus clouds using a base color. Although it seems rather trivial, it will get a bit more difficult in figuring out how these clouds affect the environment around it.

This is because of the relatively low altitudes of these clouds. For example, normally stratus clouds don’t touch the ground. But what if there are objects on the ground that can reach where the stratus clouds are?

Think about buildings and mountains. These objects extend far beyond ground level. As such, you will begin a canvas that has just basic shapes of these objects.

Make these objects dark and on a separate layer you can distinguish which layer has the correct objects.

2. Creating some form

Normally, if you have the small gradient of grey in your background, it can be considered done. However, you would probably want to create some form in the clouds to bring up more dynamic movements in your painting.

To do this, you will need to grab a small brush head and begin painting. Most of the time, I always tell you to concentrate on painting the light. However, we are going to paint the shadows in this case.

When you’re done with that, it will look rough. To smoothen it out, use a round smudge brush. However, be careful of where you will smudge. That is, smudge the darken areas to the lighter of the upper edges but keep the lower edges intact.

This will create a layer type effects from the clouds.

3. Paint stratus clouds using the background

In this step, and you will be doing this often for painting those moody scenes, is to use the background to enhance the effects of the stratus clouds.

That means you will need to work on how the background shapes interact with the stratus clouds by adjusting the color intensity from a dark grey to a lighter grey. However, make sure the grey in the mountains are still darker than the grey of the stratus clouds.

Besides making sure the grey is the right intensity, also make sure that the further the object is, the lighter it will become. This is to simulate how much air is building up in front of the objects based on the distance of the viewer from the objects.

In essence, the farther the viewer is away from the object, the less intense the colors of the objects are.

4. Adding color

The last step is creating depth with all the objects in the painting. This portion of learning how to paint stratus clouds will require a bit of imagination and knowledge of depth.

In addition to creating the build up of atmosphere, you will also need to consider the visibility of the objects. As a general rule, objects in the background are less detailed and are often blurred out.

Now, depending on the focus, this is not always true in that you can have blurring effects focused on the foreground, the middle ground, or the background.

For this example, I’ve placed the focus at the foreground. When that happens, the mountains at the very back are blurred considerably. These mountains exist only as a visible hump.

Yet, the viewers know what they are regardless of the lack of details.

Basically, in 2d digital art, the main purpose behind learning how to paint stratus clouds is to give a sense of suggestion.

In conclusion, this lesson should have taught you how to create a dreary mood and suggestion through color intensity using stratus clouds. Remember these important lessons as it is great foundation to build your knowledge on!

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