Cloud studies (skying) - where to start?

John Constable wanted to get better at painting clouds, so he went outside every day for a year (at least), painting paintings of clouds.  He called this close observation and documentation of cloud formations, skying.

I would like to try skying.

But there is something in the way preventing me from getting started.  I want to explore what this might be and see if I can find some solutions.

Colour

Colour is harder than I expected. Part of the issue is we have too many colours of paint and they are extremely vibrant. The sky isn't vibrant here.  Usually, there are variations of grey.  Blue gray, red grey, yellow grey... and these colours don't capture well on camera.  They are too subtle.  I would have to paint from life.

I've been watching the clouds all summer, which is an oddity.  We normally have dull sky.  No cloud, wildfire haze, and overcast low cloud with drizel.  But watching the cumulus (sp? Baby thunder storms),  I can see all sorts of colours that don't really make sense in my brain.

Clouds change all the time, so constable must have been very quick at mixing colours.  Limited palette maybe,  something he understood well?

Very much what I want is to work from life as the colours are so different from photos.

Medium

As much as I would like to work with oils, I found it difficult to get the kit to a place where I could spend two hours where I could see the sky.  As much as I want to use oils, perhaps something more portable that I can keep with me would help?


Anyway, that's about how far I got with my skying idea so far.  But I do know i want to learn more about cloud names and classification,  so I've been hunting for a guide book, like a bird book but for weather.   The library has books for kids and books without pictures. I would like something in-between.

When I first started looking closely at Constables cloud studies, I thought they seemed too red.  But he was painting at a time when coak/coal was replacing charcoal as the main cooking fuel in the cities and the urban population was growing faster than we could imagine today.  By mid century (1800s), the skys were so often red or black that people like Ruskin wrote about the end of days.  We can see this more in Turners paintings.

It reminds me of our late summer sky here, aug through sep we get a lot of wildfire smoke.  Although this year has been gentle on the left coast of canada, there have been days when the sun shone dark red even at noon.  Even with the weather change yesterday, the distant hills are "warm" instead of what they should be according to every landscape painting book (save ruskin) I've read.  Hills in the distance are supposed to be low-contrast and blue tinted.  Today, the trees on the  hills far away are far more red than the trees close to my house.  Because it's still morning and the sun has extra atmosphere to travel through and gather more red light (scatter blue? I don't know the science here).

I suspect this is why Constable so often painted on an earth red or even salmon coloured ground (background colour of the surface he was painting on) to save time and give the sky the red colour.

Watching the Mare's tails clouds mix with smoke from a near by wildfire as the sun set, I realized two of the barriers stopping me from painting the sky.

1. The sky we get here is unlike what i see in traditional paintings and mainstream media.   If I shared the paintings, would it look real?

2. I'm too slow at painting and have poor short term memory.

Then I got the idea that these are also two very good reasons to start skying.

If memory is an issue, because the cloud patterns change before you can paint them, you *could* take a photo, and use that to keep your memory fresher. Maybe only looking at it if you really can't remember, extending the time between glances, as much as possible, might help strengthen your memory. Maybe. Just...a thought.

I did a few oilcolour sample sketches from photographs using some student oil piants.  Some turned out better than others.  

All struggled with the cameras limitations as the small dynamic range of a camera, plus limitations of printer and computers, distortions the colours.  Clouds are a great way to show the limis of technology and what it does when we use photo reference.   Imagine a greyscale wit numbers zero to 10.  Zero being completely black,mthe most blackest thing we can see.  10 being the most whitest we can see.  In photography, we call that "dynamic range" and a normal human can see about 20 stops of light (stop being photographeese for how much light is let in.).  A high end digital camera dslr can see maybe 8 stops of light, usually less.  

To go back to our greyscale of 0 to 10, a camera can see about one third at a time.  It doesn't have to be the same third.  It could be the bright end and everything darker than that one third gets forgotten and falls to black.  Or it can be seeing the black third where lots of details in the dark, but everything brighter falls to white.  Or the third the camera sees on the greyscale could be somewhere in the middle and everything darker is black and everything higher is interpreted by the camera as white.  

With software there are things they can do to accommodate for this limitation and make it more like what a huma sees... but that has different limitations as do a normal cmyk printer.  

For example, since these cloud photos are focused on showing the details of the highlights in the clouds, they expose for the lighter values, allowing the rest of the photo to show colour inaccuratly.  A cloudlet looks great, but the sky colour isn't light enough to be daytime as the caption says, it's very dark like tropical night sky.


Anyway, it's still good practice to get my confidence and speed up.


Most successful colour combination so far

White
Naples yellow
Raw sienna
Cadmium Red Deep Hue by winton PO36,PR170 (i think any vermilion substitute would do)
Ultramarine
Raw umber

These are all student grade as the focus for now is quick studies that focus on colour and values.  Don't need fancy paints for that.