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 loke 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 aupposed 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.