Cloud Rendering

As much as I find it difficult to draw a decent looking dog cartoon (see last blog entry) I gotta admit, I'm even worse when it comes to drawing a decent cloud. There must be a subtle trick to making them look puffy & natural - as in the photo above - and not built of cement & rebar which is how my versions turn out. I know exactly what I'm shooting for when I first put pen or brush to paper, I can see it in my mind, but when I'm finished, it's usually a far cry from natural looking and tends to distract the viewer from the main subject.

The project I found myself faced with was to design a residential street setting in which I could insert a postal character (again with the postmen!) as he delivered mail on a perfectly ordinary morning in a perfectly ordinary small town on a perfectly ordinary spring day.


And to make the quaint residential scene he occupied complete, the setting seemed to cry out for a crisp, partly cloudy sky with a 20% chance of showers. I tried to steer as far from big white marshmallow style as possible, instead, shooting for the thinner, stretched-out cloud formation. Clearly I went TOO far astray from 'pillowy' and ultimately this effort fails - but it fails in a flimsy, unfinished style. The rules of this game are both baffling and illusive.


This was not the result I wanted, so the stretched clouds were re-covered in blue sky paint and my search resumed. This time I thought I'd try to 'wing' it by jabbing the brush hither/dither on the page; my white markings slowly beginning to resemble the cumulus nimbus clouds I'd imagined for this scene from the start. Okay, they weren't perfect, but they were close enough. With the final overlay of titles and other foreground text, the initial unsettling reaction to the poorly executed 'cloud art' is hopefully lessened somewhat. The viewer's attention is on the postman; or the main title; or maybe the letters he's dropped behind him on the sidewalk. The clouds, meanwhile, should be a non-issue.


I finally got around to investigating the internet for assistance (after my good friend Jonny passed over HIS suggestions) and I found that, all this time I may have been approaching the task backwards. Some of the more believable images I've found of clouds, seem not to be the result of painstakingly precise artistic brushstrokes, but the result of NOT adding brushstrokes at all. In other words, leaving the space where a cloud is desired - blank. Unpainted. Merely 'indicating' clouds.


But no. That's not really a satisfying alternative for an artist either. There's a lack of involvement. We need to see an entire page/canvas as our own creation. If we start accepting what's MISSING in a painting as part of the painting then where does it end? Where do we draw the line, so to speak? No, it's clear there has to be SOME sort of personal effort or technique in evidence when studying the  rendering of clouds.

While this might seem a strange point to cease all discussion on the subject, here we are.