I hope you find this section useful/inspirational. I don't consider myself artistic by
any means and if I can do something like this you can do it too.
Here are a couple of links with good information on painting backdrops:
The first thing I did before starting was to study pictures of clouds like this one.
There tons of them out there on web you can download.
What I learned was nothing earth shattering
(Feel free to say "Duh" as you read each point). I made
the following observations:
Clouds are random in their shape, size and distribution.
Clouds are colored a combination of white, grey and blue-grey.
Clouds that are further away reveal more of their profile than clouds that are close.
I used acrylic paints (white, blue and black) and a cheap utility sponge I got at the
hardware store.
After my first shot at painting clouds, I stood there and tried to think of as many
synonyms as I could for the word "lame".
I tried painting the sirrus clouds with a 1 inch paint brush. The results looked like
(at least to me) they could be found in a medical encyclopedia under the heading "Exotic
Skin Diseases". The problem was I had a blank wall in front of me and this
vivid picture in my mind of what I wanted and I just couldn't get what was in my head on to the wall.
But then I remembered something my boss told me when I did a stint as a cabinet maker several years ago.
He looked a what I was doing and said to me "You need to learn to think backwards." I had been
trying to put everything on the wall at one time. I started looking at cloud pictures and asked the following
question:
Which colors/forms look closer to me and which look further away?
The thin sirrus clouds were furthest back, next came the basic white shapes of the cumulus clouds with the
blue-grey/grey highlights appearing the closest.
With this in mind I painted over the clouds I had done and started with the sirrus clouds.
I took a piece of sponge, soaked it thoroughly with water, and then wrung it out so that it was damp.
I then took some white paint and added a slight touch of blue. I dipped the sponge in a little paint
and then dragged the sponge across the backdrop using a fair amount of pressure so the clouds would be
translucent. I then dampened another sponge and started creating my basic cloud forms on top of the sirrus clouds
I had just painted. This time I dabbed the paint on with the sponge letting the backdrop show through on the edges
of the cloud and becoming more opaque I moved toward the center. I then highlighted the clouds by dabbing on mixtures of
grey and blue-gray paint.
Overall I am a lot happier with the results:
Now that I have a method I can live with, I going to spend some time thinking about what "scenes" I want
and what type of cloud cover I want to use to compliment them. I might paint over what I done so far because it's a little too
"busy" for what I want to put there.
