Vivid & Colorful Skies in Gouache and Watercolor

Vivid & Colorful Skies in Gouache and Watercolor

In this class, we’re going to explore two different approaches for capturing skies in a way that’s fresh, lively, and colorful.

First, we’ll use watercolor to do five-minute, wet-into-wet skies.

• The idea with these skies is to do them very quickly, onsite. These are going to be loose and quite abstract.

  
  

• And then, once they’re dry, we’ll add some details from the landscape with ink or watercolor to help give a sense of scale and place.

  
  

• And if you really only paint in gouache, you can do this class in gouache as well. Just water it down a little and pretend it’s watercolor. You can get a lot of these same effects.

In the second part of the class, we’re going to take a little more time to paint really vivid, bold skies in gouache.

• I’ll show you how to treat gouache kind of like watercolor to get light washes for clear skies, and also as backgrounds for something like a sunset.

  
  

• Then we’ll do some dramatic daytime and sunset skies, and work on blending and shading to get convincing cloud shapes that still reflect your own style.

  
  

• I’ll also show you how to use watercolor like gouache, by mixing tube watercolors with white gouache. So this is a great trick for watercolor painters who haven’t quite made the leap into gouache yet, because you’ll only need that one tube of white gouache.

  
  

• Also, if you happen to have a color you really love in watercolor, but you don’t have that color in gouache, well guess what? You can just mix a little white gouache into it and bring it right into your painting.

Whether you’re primarily painting in watercolor or gouache, and whether you’re usually drawing from life in a travel sketchbook or working in your studio from photographs, these loose, colorful approaches to skies will add life to your urban sketches, cityscapes, and landscapes.

For Travel Sketching and Landscapes

Url: View Details

What you will learn

• How to create a transparent layer of sky color
• How to paint vivid clouds in watercolor or gouache
• How to paint quickly and loosely when painting from life

Rating: 4.66667

Level: Beginner Level

Duration: 2.5 hours

Instructor: Amy Stewart