Five Tips for Big, Atmospheric Skies As landscape painters, we know that painting skies and clouds can be challenging! Creating a sense of air, atmosphere and “bigness” in our skies is what we are after. Here are five tips to remember when you are painting skies: Keep these tips in mind and you are on […]
Sky Values- The Key to Big Atmospheric Skies!
One of the most important ingredients for painting big atmospheric skies is getting the values right. We know that generally speaking the sky will have the lightest values in the landscape because it is the source of light (think Carlson’s Theory of Angles- if you don’t know about that you should!). The value of a […]
Mixing Blues For Skies
When mixing colors for skies we concern ourselves with the three attributes of color: value, temperature and chroma. As we know from Carlson’s Theory of Angles, the sky will generally be the lightest value in the landscape–a range of values actually, as the value of the sky grades from lightest at the horizon to darkest […]
Seago Skies
Edward Seago (1910-1974) was a British landscape painter. He is one of the best known and widely collected British artists of the 20th century. He enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime including royal patronage by several members of the Royal Family, including the the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinborough and Prince Charles. Seago painted […]
The Vault of the Sky
What shape is the sky? As landscape painters we must remember that the sky is not a flat plane in the distance, but a vault which arches up toward and over the viewer’s head. The fact that we are depicting a vault rather than a flat plane affects the perspective we see in the […]
When to Paint the Sky
“It is much easier to paint a sky to suit a landscape than a landscape to suit a sky.” Sir Alfred East, The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour (1915). When should you paint the sky? Should it be the first thing you paint when you begin a landscape painting? The last? All at once? […]