Magma Classroom Recap - Clouds - 22 & 25 May

2023-05-31T04:56:35+0000 · 5min read
Ryan Allan author image
Ryan Allan Artist and content writer | Reviews digital art tech | Paints under the name Eyekoo | Dreams of torii gates with his morning coffee
Magma Classroom Recap - Clouds - 22 & 25 May cover image

In last week’s Magma Classroom LIVE sessions, we chose to paint some clouds. This was definitely a fun one to tackle and it took some time to try get those clouds looking nice and fluffy. Each session was an hour long but our participants are always welcome to spend a bit more time if they want to render things out more after the stream.

The current series of Classroom sessions with artist, Ryan Allan, have different subjects and reference images each time to keep practicing and building on the fundamentals of painting that we covered in the beginning.

Shoutout to the awesome people that joined us for the sessions including: Eyebrowl, Nexus, Adinaa, Everesce, and Radek

Magma Classroom LIVE 22 May 2023

Cycling through the clouds painted by the participants of this session of the Magma Classroom

Whether you’ve drawn clouds before or not, we can always refer back to our fundamentals and take some time to analyze what we’re seeing.

After blocking in our background, with the top of the sky being slightly richer in color, we start building up our shapes.

Some important things we looked out for through the study were:

  • light direction - keeping that consistent as we move into smaller and overlapping shapes;
  • value - often the changes in value are not as big as we think;
  • perspective - especially if you can see the underside the cloud or it’s really big and trails off into the distance;
  • hard and soft edges - clouds often have a mix of hard and soft edges in the silhouette;
  • reflected light - low clouds might appear to have a bit of the ground color reflected in the underside.

Magma Classroom Live 25 May 2023

A GIF cycling through the different paintings of clouds during our last Classroom stream.

This was a challenging one for the time limit and is definitely something we’ll revisit. As always, we welcome suggestions from our Classroom artists for subjects they want to study in our future sessions.

The Magma Classroom LIVE sessions with Ryan take place each week:

  • Monday 12pm Central Europe Time
  • Thursday 10am Central Daylight Time

Stay tuned about upcoming sessions by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Ryan Allan author image
Ryan Allan Artist and content writer | Reviews digital art tech | Paints under the name Eyekoo | Dreams of torii gates with his morning coffee
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