I love clouds. No… I am fascinated by them. They are undefined, unstructured and simply beautiful. Every cloud is unique and there will never be another one like that one.
I recently went to the website Outdoorphoto and found the most incredible reference photos of South African clouds (the best ones around!). The painting I made was completed on my iPad Pro using ProCreate. It took me about 30 minutes to complete late one evening. I like it and it may develop into a full-scale oil painting.
I recently painted another painting for my wife. This is the second largest painting I have even painted (about 120cm by 60cm) and the scale is quite challenging given that my usual paintings are around a rather compact 17cm by 51cm. It is difficult to scale up and still achieve realism. Well, I think it worked. I would have liked a brighter feel to the painting, but I struggled to increase the hue, or lightness/brightness of the work.
Below is the painting. I painted with Windsor and Newton’s Winston oil paints. The bottom image is the reference painting I did on my iPad. It turned out to be a key to getting realism into the foreground and the middle ground (the rocks).
The painting makes me long back to my beloved mountains in the Western Cape in South Africa.
The final oil painting
The reference digital painting.
I recently came across a photo of the Connemara National Park in Ireland and decided to paint it. The image below is my test version of the painting and was done on my iPad Pro using ProCreate. I am resonably impressed with the result, especially the way the front, middle ground and distant ground have their own feel, but still merge. I will put more effort into the clouds in the oil painting.
Francois' Art Blog 