Begin painting the sky (and more)

Painting in layers gives depth and substance to a picture so we don’t have to worry too much about final colours and subtle shades.

See how I do it in this video, and read the details and transcript below:

Video – 4 minutes 31 secs

Still using paint quite sparingly and handling the brush lightly, I add some base colours.
The yellow background we started with shows through instead of gleaming white. Allowing the yellow background to show helps to keep colour harmony and unity in the composition.

Also – it helps you pay attention to your painting rather than worrying about covering the canvas.

Can’t wait to show you the painting take shape after this!

I hope you enjoyed the video showing how I started painting the sky .

Transcript of this video

Ok let’s take a bigger brush, and do a bit of the sky while we have some paint handy.

I’m just going to, very lightly, blue a bit of it up.

I’m going to leave a kind of glow in the middle because I think it looks as if it might be that kind of a scene.

If you’re going to do a Sky with varying blue in it, bear in mind that it might be lighter near the horizon than at the top. You might already know that.
Sometimes you know stuff in real life that you don’t quite know how to depict, so it’s worth mentioning now and again.

Now I’m not going to fill this right up because, as I said, you might want some of that to show through.

I’m assuming a little bit of cloud so letting the White and the Yellow show through; that yellow might be handy – part of the edges of some clouds or something later, when we get to that.

I haven’t put a lot of paint on there.
You can do, you know, if you want it thick, feel free, but if you’re going to build up to thick you’re better off building it you know (starting off thinner).
You can go straight into really thick if you want to, you can do what you like, really.

Sometimes it’s (the sky) a bit Greeny towards the bottom so I’m going to let it do that.
Did you see, I just picked up a tiny bit of the mix we used in this field …
I’m going to just put a little bit of pale green in here

Do you see it’s really quite fun to just not let the paint go on completely evenly all the time, as you get variations in colour then.

I just come down into these trees a little bit in case they … (might need highlights)
You can always put some highlights in but it’s quite handy to have some transparent ones, ready to go that you can paint around.

I’ll put a bit of glow of that – whoops I can’t change the angle too much just yet, I might- later.
Sometimes a little highlight of something in there can be useful later on, just as an under thing, because when you come to fill it in – it might not be those stripes at all but, you’ve got some variation underneath.

I wouldn’t say finished sky but it certainly changed the feel of it.

I don’t really know what season this is even, yet!

I mean the red was only that so that we could see where we were, not because it was going to be a red scene, you know, and little bits of that showing through will help (give it depth).