Clouds, Perspective and Photographs

Tranquility Transparent Watercolour

You all know what perspective is. It is the way objects in the distant landscape appear to be smaller because they are further away than closer objects. It is the way railway lines appear to converge as they disappear into the distance. It is also the way in which colours appear bluer the further away they are.

So what has this to do with clouds?

For a landscape painter, whatever your medium, (oils, acrylic, transparent watercolour or pastel) it is very important. Clouds are objects in the landscape and their distance away from you vary. Perspective applies to them just as much as if they were hard concrete objects.
Go outside and look at a cloudy sky. Those clouds high in the sky, almost above your head, are large and show a great deal of separation. As you look lower down, at perhaps a 45-degree angle, the clouds tend to appear smaller and more closely packed.

Lowering your gaze again you will see that towards the horizon clouds tend to become very tightly packed together and much smaller. and The colours also soften.

If you take photographs of clouds and sky patterns for reference as I do you must be very careful when you come to use them, especially if the camera was angled upward when the photograph was taken.

If such a photograph were to be used directly the perspective would be wrong. It would need to be adjusted towards the lower sky levels to bring the perspective back into line.

When taking photographs of the sky for reference it is helpful if a note is made of the direction in which the camera is pointing, the time of day (digital cameras do this automatically) and the general weather conditions (rain, wind etc.).

That’s it. The next article will be posted on Friday.

Till then, take care and keep on painting.

Tony

P.S. I realised this morning that a couple of postings ago I used a painting I had already used once before. Whoops! I shall try not to let it happen again.