Tips for painting blue skies

If you paint landscapes, you paint many skies.  Do you spend much time thinking about how to paint skies?

Choosing the right colour is one of the first steps.  Many of us are tempted to use blues out of the tube.  However, these are often brighter than the colours we actually see in the sky. Therefore, it is recommend that you gently mute the tube blue with a small touch of orange.

You also need to pay attention to how the colours change in the sky.  When looking up in the sky, you'll notice darker and more intense color saturation . As you start looking lower, the colours become lighter and are a bit warmer. How often have you admired oranges or pinks near the horizon?

In addition, you might want to infer a greater spectrum of light in the sky. To do this, you may want to place marks of two or three colors in close proximity to each other and allow them to interact on wet paper, e.g. blue, blue-green, and blue-violet. They all share blue in common, but also allow for a touch of yellow and red to be present. These marks will blend into each other lightly to create a solid blue sky that is more interesting.

Today's artist find is Xavier Swolfs:

Have a great week,
Danielle