Flat brushes are incredible tools for creating the random edges of clouds. By twisting the brush between your fingers and rocking it to paint with edges or corners you build beautiful chaotic patterns. If you try to create these kinds of edges with a regular brush, you may easily fall into a pattern of regular marks. Clouds made by deliberate and intentional painting often lack the spontaneity of clouds created with a dancing flat brush.
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Start by painting the shadows on the bases of the clouds with purple-gray tined with peach, pink, or other hues. The cloud shadows at the top of the page should be larger and deeper. As you get lower on the page make the cloud shadows smaller and more linear.
Wash the horizon with light tan or pale yellow to suggest haze.
Now dance the edge of the flat waterbrush across the top, carving holes into the clouds. Make the holes toward the top deeper and larger. As you go down the page, make the holes increasingly linear (horizontal). )
Clean your brush and charge it with cyan (diluted phthalo blue or manganese blue hue). Make these new marks more horizontal as you move down the page.
Let’s keep the foreground simple. Here a wash of green and yellow-brown
Keep the distant hills pale, blueish, and without detail to suggest distance.
Tap the flatbrush tip at the edges of the waterway to suggest vegetation.
The blue of the water is the same hue as the sky but slightly darker.
A few dashes and dots of white jell pen on the water suggest ripples.
