Today we are going to paint a sky and a cloud. There are many ways to do it. This is a simple way. I also want to tell you about a product called acrylic retarder and what it is, it is an extender, you just dump a tube… a little one inch amount in some water in a spray bottle, shake it up.
When you get ready to paint you take your tub water and put three or four sprays in that. If you like to keep your paints a little longer from getting a cover on them before they dry out you can spray them with this too.
Ok, it just limits the time a little bit, not much, but a little bit. The first thing we do for making a painting is very simple, you want to wet your brush, you can take some of this thick you can buy in a store. First before you do that wet your brush, wet the canvas, where you are going to put your sky and always make sure that you paint your sky further down than where you are going to bring the ground so that they will meet and you would not have any faded areas. Make sure all of this is wet.
When you are doing acrylics right away you have to paint really fast and you do not want to overwork the canvas. If you do you will have spots in there that lift and then you will not be happy.
Then what you want to do is use one of these on it okay… So you don’t want to do that. It takes a little practice but do not worry, you can always Gesso it over, if you do not like it, start painting again. Take a little bit of this thick gesso, paint it on, as fast as you can, add a little water, get it spread all over where you need it, go a little further down on your canvas and now what you are going to do is you are going to take your brush and clean it with new water, get most of the paint out of it and get the water out of it too and take some of your blue, whatever blue you choose to use and start at the top and paint really fast down and as you notice, as you go down it will get lighter, okay.
You just keep doing that really fast and as you do you can also lighten your brush load, okay and it will take the lines out of it. Clean your brush if you need to and then lightly you can take a blender, one of the brushes I was explaining about and just go over it and that is your sky.
Now, we are going to starting the cloud. Clean your brush from the blue. Get rid of all of the water in it, so it does not run. If you get drips that is okay too that is part of the painting. Remember also you do not want to make everything perfect and if you do, nobody likes to look at the painting, you want to have a little bit oddness in it.
For clouds, you can take your white, take a big garb of it for example and we are going to put like that. This is part of the texture having some of this okay, so do not worry about it. Remember there is more fluffiness at the top and more flatness on the bottom. So, we are going to add this and you can take the blender for example and run it down like this and that will help you with the cloud.
Source : Expert Village