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.

haven't been feeling great, so watched a lot of tutorials on how to paint clouds.  Am getting very disappointed.  

None of these clouds look like the clouds we get here.  

Example, yesterday:



It only lasted long enough for me to run inside, grab my camera.  By the time I got a cuppa coffee and my painting kit, it was gone.  

I need to find a way to paint quickly.  

Hi R,

I guess that I, too, love Skying, but my preferred medium is photography.  And I share your frustration with getting the color, brightness, saturation, etc. correct.

Do you have a DSLR?  I seem to remember that we had a discussion a loooong time ago about you getting one.  If you do, you could do a couple thing.

1). Adjust the white balance.  By far, that modification alone has helped me take accurate pictures of clouds and views of the sky.

2). The other option is to use a patch of blue sky as the white balance.  I have used this with lesser cameras and generally gotten good results.

My favorite sky views are early sunrise—I like the way the red rays of the sun light up the underside of a cloud layer.  It takes very specific conditions.  But if I just point at a bright red or pink section of sky and fire, then the automatic white balance reads the brightest source of light (the bright pink/red in this case) and determines that’s white and the outcome is not at all impressive.  These two techniques helped me a lot.


Eric.

This is with a dslr.  It's quite frustrating as none of the colour information was on the image,  the reds, green and yellows in the cloud are missing, but it was able to capture a hint of purple.  Is there a setting in camera to try?

The other big problem is focus.  Mine resists infinite focus like sky and needs something terrestrial in the shot. Even on full manual, it gives an error.

Unless there is something I'm missing, photography for clouds is probably going to be too frustrating as the goal is to capture what I see and even the best cinematic camera (which has more than double the dynamic range and colour capture as the besr dslr), can only see about 20% of what a human eye sees.  

R,

On my DSLR, the autofocus has to be turned off with a separate switch.  

Again, on mine, I have have full manual control of things like exposure.

Even if on auto settings, I aim directly at the blue sky, press halfway and don’t release, then aim at intended targets and press fully.  This locks the settings on the blue sky but now aims at intended targets.  It took me a while to figure this out.


Eric

Here's a question-  do even professional photos look like a real sky to you?

I think of photography as it's own artform- but even the most beautiful sky photos don't look like a real sky to me.

I often find paintings, especially with "odd" colours, better capture the feeling of a sky than any photograph.  I see purples and reds and greens and yellow in the sky that a camera never does.

I have a habit of taking 2-4 photos with differnet camera settings if I think I might later want to paint something I see, which helps, but still isnt enough.

Eric Hanson wrote:R,

On my DSLR, the autofocus has to be turned off with a separate switch.  

Again, on mine, I have have full manual control of things like exposure.

Even if on auto settings, I aim directly at the blue sky, press halfway and don’t release, then aim at intended targets and press fully.  This locks the settings on the blue sky but now aims at intended targets.  It took me a while to figure this out.


Eric

I almost never use auto.  

I tried all the usual settings,  then I did a few with full manual.  Then I got crazy and turned on full auto.  That was the most successful for sky, butthe iso was high for my liking as I don't like digital grain removal.

And although it was a nice photo, it couldn't capture the colour information i want.  To get the clouds exposed  correctly, I had to under expose the sky which sucks because it was baby pastels and not deep blue.

I'll keep working on it, but I don't think a camera exists yet that can do what I seek.  At least not a digital one.

Catie George wrote:Here's a question-  do even professional photos look like a real sky to you?

It's a good question.

No.

Never.

and i have so many sky books.

It's like the difference between the photo of a painting and a painting.  So much is lost with the modern mediums.

I think of photography as it's own artform- but even the most beautiful sky photos don't look like a real sky to me.

I often find paintings, especially with "odd" colours, better capture the feeling of a sky than any photograph.  I see purples and reds and greens and yellow in the sky that a camera never does.

I have a habit of taking 2-4 photos with differnet camera settings if I think I might later want to paint something I see, which helps, but still isnt enough.

That's a good idea to take multiple phots with different settings.

This is kind of off topic but I have a morning routine that I've been doing for a year and a half now.  Every morning when I take the dog for a walk, I take a picture straight above me of the sky.  I periodically put all the photos in a grid for the month and eventually the year.  There's no real point to it but I love it and it's become an important part of my day.  It really helps me be present and look at the sky, and notice things like weather patterns (which months have the most cloudy days? which months have the brightest blue skies?) and get out of my head. It's funny how much happiness I get out of a cool cloud pattern that morning that I never would have noticed otherwise, and how I'll really look at the clouds in a way I never did before.  Here's an image of the first four months I did it.  I'm looking forward to making a giant grid of 2026 skies once I've done a whole calendar year (I started in the spring of 2025 so I've done over a year but not a full calendar year yet).  I made the photo grid on Canva.