AnimaXVI

I'm always floored by your larger scale pieces. ✨

I think how I mainly tackle an idea is with thirds, as in a piece usually has a background, a middle, and a front. Like imagine your eye is the camera, and there's things closer to it and further away. I'll try to illustrate what I mean:

The base of an environment is choosing what you're focusing on, similarly as a camera can focus on something and leave the rest unfocused and vague.

What you choose to highlight affects the feeling of depth and mood your piece will have. You CAN choose to have no focus, it just results in a more cartoony, more flat looking art style, which might be what you want, but for a very dynamic deep feeling composition you need some sort of a focus.

Let's take one of my pieces as an example:

What makes the piece dynamic, is having the front piece twist very close to you eye/camera, which let's the middle and background feel like they're further away and creates a sense of scale.

There's also something I'm doing, which adds to the feeling of vastness, and it's breaking perspective. The view is not actually possible to be seen, you can't see into the pit and under the columns top, if the picture is in perspective. So to be able to get both into the same view I've bent the view sort of like a fisheye lens!

I maybe have a few insights, but am definitely not much of an expert on clouds. The first thought I have is that many make the mistake of thinking about them in 2D, like a picture plastered on the sky. Yet, clouds are 3-dimentional objects just as anything else, so I find it's key to imagine that shape, even if the shape is so irregular and hard to grasp at times..!

I'll try to simplify what I'm thinking, imagine a cluster of cubes and how the lights and shadows form around them. Now Imagine those cubes being wrapped in fluff, the shadows stay the same! An actual cloud would be much more complicated in structure, but I hope you're getting the idea...

Another key is to simplify, another mistake is trying to bring in a million nuances of color and shapes into the cloud, a cloud consist mainly of the highlight points and the shadow, the most important part is the highlights! They show the shape of your cloud, where does the light (the sun) hit the cloud and creates the harshest lights?

Clouds come in a lot of shapes, references are great when looking at the time of day, weather etc. for what kinds of clouds form in which. There are also usually several types of clouds in the sky at the same time, so bring a lot of variety!

I love drawing mermaids with legs 🫧 I created these for last month’s Patreon drawing challenge! If you like challenges, sign up to the flame tier and join us ~ we just got started on painting clouds for June, chanelling the old dutch masters and their dramatic painted skies!