**LONG POST**
easy method for fluffy, organic, photoreal clouds!
1. grid your rendering and string-grid your drop. no worries if you don’t have a rendering - you get to make up your clouds!
2. mix colors. sometimes you can get away with only using grey, building up darkness with each spray pass. often, though, clouds will have some color to them. for these, I initially mixed 6 cloud colors: very light blue, lavender, medium grey, dark grey, medium purple, dark purple.
3. following the rendering (or your imagination), sprinkle sawdust, kitty litter, ground walnut shells, or other granulated material onto the drop in the places where the clouds are the lightest. you can push the granules around with a chip brush on a bamboo if they didn’t land where you want them to be. don’t go too heavy with the coverage at this step - big chunks of white are not desirable. *note*: not all clouds have white tops and grey bottoms. depending on their position in relation to the sun, most clouds actually have a white center and a slightly darker top edge. only when they are somewhat backlit by the sun will they have a white top edge. think of them like you would a sphere - after all, fluffy clouds are made of rounded shapes. PICK UP THE STRING GRID before you apply any paint! once the string grid is gone, check for and repair any grid marks it may have left in your “drawing”.
4. mist the drop with your lightest color. if you need your blue sky to be translucent, consider using a small spray tool like a preval, small HVLP*, or airbrush to contain the spray to just the clouds. if your sky is not translucent, you can just make a wide pass over the whole drop with a Hudson-style sprayer, P-50, large HVLP*, or garden sprayer.
*HVLPs may blow around a lightweight material like sawdust, but test it with something heavier like kitty litter. I almost got a blister on my palm from pumping P-50s, so if pneumatic sprayers are an option for you, it’s worth a try.
5. sprinkle more granules onto your clouds, covering the next-lightest valued areas (aka whatever areas you wish to remain the color you just sprayed). using that chip brush, shuffle around any patches where you didn’t add new granules. don’t sweep it all away, just poke it a bit to break up edges. it is especially important to break up edges where clouds overlap. you don’t want the white top of a cloud to have a solid, harsh edge where it comes in front of the dark base of another cloud - it’s nice to have a little fuzz there. spray your next layer.
6. repeat step 5 until you’ve sprayed on your darkest cloud color, making sure to shuffle those edges between each pass. as you approach your darker values, consider minimizing your spray pattern so you don’t get super dark paint in your sky. even if the sky is not translucent, it will be hard to cover that super dark paint with sky colors. when you’ve finished spraying your cloud colors, cover the entirety of each cloud with granules. make sure the bottoms of the clouds match the crispness you see in the rendering. you may want to sweep the sky at this point - after many passes of sprinkling granules, you probably have a fine layer of dust settled on your once-clean sky.
7. now that your clouds are completely masked, spray in your sky color. If your sky is translucent, consider using dyes for this step - they are less opaque than paint, and will “glow” more nicely when lit from behind. spraying the sky will probably take multiple passes, so break up the top edges of your clouds with your brush in between sprays.
8. the big reveal! once the sky is dry, sweep away your granules. I just used a big ol’ push broom. if you find that you have glued any granules to your drop with paint, use a stiff broom or brush to scrub them away. kitty litter comes up nicely with just a broom, but sawdust is so fine that it also needs to be vacuumed - I quickly cleaned up my drops using a Shop-Vac with a brush head.
9. use a small tool for touch-ups to avoid overspray where you don’t want it. you can see that I beefed up the purple parts of my clouds, as well as the sky ombre.
done! I really recommend this method for anyone who wants to create realistic clouds, especially if they’re inexperienced with painting clouds, and ESPECIALLY especially if a drop needs to be translucent. it’s tricky because you can’t see what your drop looks like as you’re painting it, but if it really bothers you, you can sweep off a patch to check, then replace the granules. but if you’re patient, if you work in thin, gradual layers, and if you trust yourself, you’ll do fine!
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