Let's start with the two canvases with the same background. Let's see what happens if we start with the same scene, yet change our brushstrokes slightly to create two completely different moods. Let's have some fun experimenting with painting a storm now. Grey skies are a great place to look because it restricts the range of colours and contrast and allows you to focus in, rather than being distracted by too much information. Often a painting doesn’t work whether it be moody or otherwise, because of an inability to see and translate nuance. Going into a painting a storm “educated”, usually prevents a lot of suffering (not all though!). Sometimes the camera will exaggerate contrast and colour, so it’s a handy tool to start looking for these shifts.

I recommend sitting for a while, perhaps with a camera, and really studying the nuance in grey stormy skies. As you get closer to a light source, or to gaps in the cloud, you’ll discover some French Ultramarine, some Dioxazine Purple, and even Cadmium Yellow Medium can influence your greys. The darker areas created by denser cloud cover can often tend towards pthalo blues. Often the sun, while obscured, still influences the colours in the clouds. The rule of “warm to cool” (ie warmer colours closer to the light source, cooler colours as you moved further away from the light source) is a nice place to start looking. When you start looking closely at even very gloomy skies, you’ll start to see the influence of quite unexpected colour. Scroll down to the end of this page for another example of this. It can make a sensational backdrop that will send your painting in a direction you may not have considered. This can often give you an incredibly compelling stormy sky that you never would’ve achieved if you had “tried” to paint it. This process works fantastically if you’re painting a storm using those lovely muted greys, throwing the paint on, throwing some water at it, and letting it do it’s thing. Sometimes when I’m stuck, I’ll throw some paint at a canvas, swirl it around and see if a painting appears in the mess that’s left. We'll do an exercise using this example a little later.

A few small changes, and an entirely different story is told. Another contrasting example that springs to mind is the same sky, the same trees, but an oily sea, with an almost mirror like reflection, and some glazes to subdue the distance, and the scene is transformed to the calm before the storm.

Paint storm