In this class, were going to explore two different approaches for capturing skies in a way thats fresh, lively, and colorful. First, well 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 theyre dry, well 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 its watercolor. You can get a lot of these same effects. In the second part of the class, were going to take a little more time to paint really vivid, bold skies in gouache. Ill 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 well do some dramatic daytime and sunset skies, and work on blending and shading to get convincing cloud shapes that still reflect your own style. Ill 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 havent quite made the leap into gouache yet, because youll only need that one tube of white gouache. Also, if you happen to have a color you really love in watercolor, but you dont 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 youre primarily painting in watercolor or gouache, and whether youre 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.
