How to Draw Clouds in Pencil

Video Transcript

"Hello there, I'm Ralph Papa, from papagallery.com and today we're learning how to draw. In this clip I'm going to show you how to draw clouds. And we're drawing them in pencil, and I'm just going to start off with a horizon line just to get a semblance of where the clouds would start. And then I'm going to sort of make little puffs like this, sort of flat on the bottom but vertically coming up and these are often what we call cumulus clouds and they might just look like that. As we get higher into the stratosphere here or into the air the clouds might get bigger in shapes like this, and again I'm just drawing those little curve tops on them and the bottom. We might put some real big ones up higher, you know, like that. Now, depending on where the sun is we'll have some shading on them, the sun coming down from the right we're going to shade the left side and give it some shape so that these clouds look like they're solid. And the underneath side would be darker because the light's hitting them from the top right. Now you can just give a little shading like that, you can do these up here the same way. Again, we're using a graphite pencil so it shows up a little lighter than it would be for charcoal. And now the sky would be blue and the blue sky when you're looking at black and white would tend to look darker like that, so we're going to give the sky a little bit of a tone so that the clouds stand out. And here I'm just accenting more of the shape of those clouds, and there's every shape cloud you can think of but we're sort of more tuned in when we draw or paint, we like to do stratocumulus clouds. Maybe way up on the top you'll see clouds that might be shaped like, very lose, like this and spread very thin. Now there, with pencil, is the way we draw clouds. This has been Ralph Papa, and thank you for watching."