Painting Clouds on Wet Paper Tape the edges of your watercolor paper off so that it stays stretched … • A spray bottle helps keep the paper damp while working and can be used to produce various atmospheric effects. For this painting, I used a medium-sized round brush and three colors: cobalt blue, Naples yellow and cadmium red.

Be careful though. • A smooth cloth, towel or tissue is useful for lifting out clouds from the paint, and I’ll demonstrate how to do this in the video. Use a synthetic brush for this technique. When painting clouds using watercolor, the white of the clouds will be the white of the paper. Don't stress about trying to paint around the shapes of the clouds, but create them by lifting off paint using something absorbent, such as a piece of paper towel or corner of a clean rag. Bleach can destroy your brush!

A mixture of 50% water and 50% bleach works well. Besides paper, paint, and a brush, there are only a few other tools that I use to paint clouds. If you want to enhance the lifting of the watercolor, you can add a bit of bleach to your water.