TECHNIQUE: CLOUDS IN COREL PAINTER
Corel Painter's oil pastels are possibly my favourite thing ever. This is
how I paint clouds in them.
Firstly, using any tool you like, put down a background color. Please,
don't just flood fill. Paint yourself a sky gradient of two or three colours
depending on the time of day. These are going to be midday clouds so I just
used two gentle shades of blue, one with a bit more yellow in it.
The tool I like to use for clouds is Soft Oil Pastel 20/15/10. The brush shape
is a sort of rounded triangle when you select it.
I am starting with Soft Oil Pastel 20. Always use the biggest brush you can
get away with. This is quite a small image; if I was working on a bigger
canvas I would make the brush larger to match. Sometimes much larger: for
NiGHTS and the Wind Guardian I laid the base clouds down with a brush about
size 80.
Mix or pick a whiter (but not white) colour and start making squiggly lines,
varying your pen pressure as you go. Do this on the same layer as your
gradient! You want the colors to mix and smear and blend all over the place.
Continue with your white, making a lovely mess and smearing everything
about. The triangle shaped brush will naturally make lovely irregular
cloudy patterns if you squiggle it around.
By pressing very lightly you can make even gentler wispy shapes and get a
sort of foggy effect as well.
Now it's pretty much good enough to leave it there, but maybe for some
conditions we want more sense of lighting.
Take a darker, cooler color and put some on the cloud-shapes where you think
they will be in shadow. I have gone down to size 15 brush now.
Sampling colors off the image, start blending the shadows into the
clouds. You can't really do too much here; if it looks like you're losing
the shadows entirely, just put some more on and keep on blending. The more
messy it gets, the better the final result will be.
Using the size 10 brush to finish off with some very fine blending.
Email: quillandlauren@yahoo.com
AIM: eloze (email me first with your AIM name so I can add you)
MSN: metara_v2@hotmail.com (by prior appointment only)
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