Clouds; Easy to Look at, Hard to Draw

Apart from Archie, the other characters in the book at clouds. One is a rain cloud, one is a thunder cloud and the last is a snow cloud. With Archie, I had a rough idea of how to draw a snowflake, and the shape is quite easy to build upon seeming as they are quite geometric. Clouds on the other hand can be all sorts of shapes and sizes, and are quite difficult to make them appear as a singular object.

After much scanning of the internet and doodling, I realised that one of the only feasible ways I was going to be able to illustrate a cloud character was to make them appear more cartoon like.

Below are some examples of clouds in children's books:

All of the clouds pictured above have sustenance, they are there for a reason. They ooze emotion and add to the other elements of the drawing. Except...none of them are characterised.

I tried to look for cloud characters, but all I found were cute fun and lovable depictions:

These depictions although suitable for children are quite basic and not what I wanted to go for. However, I did take some inspiration from them. Instead of creating entirely shapeless watercolour clouds, I would take a basic shape and add depth and background. Perfect I thought, this should be pretty easy!

It was not easy.

So I decided to take a different angle. How about looking at actual clouds? (These photos have been edited with Pilxr).

Although I don't think I could replicate these on paper, it is defiantly good to use nature as a reference.

So, with a better understanding of cloud composition, I went back to the drawing board and started to sketch.

Sketching was also quite difficult, but I did get a few ideas that I thought I might be able to work with. I decided to focus on the rain and thunder clouds as I had more of an idea of the colour palettes (mostly blues and greys).

Here is what I eventually came up with!

Vladamir the Thundercloud

Hank the raincloud

Although these are rough and do need to be done on proper watercolour paper, I am quite happy with the initial forms but do still need to work on some of the line work and colours.

So far though I feel quite happy with how each character is coming along!