Painting · 18 min
How to paint a sunset with clouds
Three ways to keep the sky luminous — oil, acrylic, and watercolor — without turning the clouds into mud.
- 01
Block the sky first, not the clouds
Lay the sky as a simple gradient from a warmer band at the horizon to a cooler one above. Leave the cloud shapes as open paper or a thin pale wash. Clouds are holes in the color, not white objects pasted on top.
- 02
Paint the light side and the shadow side separately
The lit edge of a cloud takes the sky color, warmed. The underside takes a gray mixed from the sky’s own pigments — never a tube black. If the shadow looks purple, you added too much blue; if it looks brown, you added too much red.
- 03
Soften only the edges that are far away
Near clouds can have a crisp lit rim. Distant ones should melt into the sky. Use a clean, barely damp brush for the soft edge and stop before the shape disappears.
- 04
One last check
Squint. The sky should still read as light, and the clouds should sit in it rather than on it. If the painting has gone dull, you mixed too many colors on the same brush. Wipe it and go back to two pigments at a time.