How to Paint Clouds in Procreate (Two Ways)

Clouds punish overworking. Paint them stroke by careful stroke and they turn into cotton balls; the softness has to come from how you build them, not how hard you try. Freya teaches cloud painting at two levels, a beginner-friendly smudge-tool skyscape in her Procreate Masterclass and a realistic oil-style method in her Landscape Painting course, and the two together cover almost any sky you'd want to paint.

Method one: the smudge-tool skyscape

The Masterclass exercise builds a dreamy cloudscape from three tools most beginners underrate: a hard brush, the smudge tool and the eraser.

Set up: a screen-size canvas, horizontal, 300 DPI, RGB. Sketch rough cloud shapes with the Freya Eaglehawk brush on a layer named Sketch, drop its opacity to about 15%, and keep it on top. Set the background to a light cyan blue.

Sky: on a new layer below the sketch, paint a band of cyan blue across the top with the Freya Hard Brush Solid at around 50% size. Then switch to the smudge tool loaded with the Freya Tamar Sponge at about 25% and blend the band into the background, gentle circular strokes on the contrast edge, then left and right.

Cloud base: new layer. Paint the cloud shape in a grayish blue with the Hard Brush Solid, then take the smudge tool down to 15% and work the edges. The move that makes clouds fluffy is not a drag but a gentle tap-and-scroll along the edge, roughing the silhouette into soft lumps while the bottom gets blended smooth.

Cloud light: another new layer. Paint white on the top of each cloud mass with the Freya 0.8 Pigma, then tap the edges soft with the smudge tool at 10%. Now the underrated part: switch the eraser to the same Tamar Sponge brush and erase gently inside the cloud. Those soft removals carve the gaps and shadows that make a cloud read as a volume instead of a white blob.

Work in small groups, top to bottom, repeating the same paint, smudge, erase cycle. The shadow areas stay the base color; you never paint the shadows at all.

The lesson finishes with a whimsical touch, a tiny whale floating among the clouds, built from an oval, a trapezoid head and a triangle tail, colored with alpha lock and a clipping mask, plus a splash from the Freya Flicks stamp brush. Optional, but a good reminder that a sky painting doesn't have to be serious to teach you the tools.

Method two: oil-style clouds with real light

The Landscape Painting course treats clouds as an oil painter would, in her Ocean & Sky lesson, and the logic transfers to any realistic sky: shadows first, then reflected color, then light, then a restrained final highlight.

Shadows first. On a layer named Clouds Shadow, Freya mixes a grayish blue, lightens it to match the faint upper shadows, and paints the undersides with the Freya Oil Landscape 32 brush at 12%. It's a flat-edged brush that follows the angle of your Apple Pencil, so rotating your hand changes the stroke direction, exactly like turning a real flat brush. Keep strokes fluid, ease the pressure near the edges so they blend, and drop to 5% for small clouds. A lighter gray follows in the upper shadow areas at around 8%.

Reflected color is the step everyone skips. Clouds pick up color from what's below them. Freya color-picks from the grass, the land and the sea, then brushes each color faintly into the cloud shadows directly above that element, using the Freya Landscape 24 brush at 8% size with opacity dropped to 25%. Just a hint of each. It's subtle, and it's the difference between clouds that float in the scene and clouds pasted onto it. (Remember to put the brush opacity back to 100% after.)

Light comes from warmth, not white. Here's the insight worth the whole lesson: you can't lighten a light cloud by moving toward white. Freya's solution is to shift temperature instead, choosing a pale yellow, as if the sunlit tops were warmer, painted with the Freya Oil Landscape 37 at 8% on a Clouds Light layer, focusing on the tops with extra strokes at the very edges. Layer by layer it gets fluffier.

Pure white is the last five percent. On a final Highlight layer, the Freya Oil Landscape 34 at 5% places a few quick strokes of the brightest white only where the reference shows real sun.

"Keep in mind, you can't go any whiter than this; adding too much will make your highlights look dull and take away from the painting's depth."

Freya, in the Ocean & Sky Landscape: Sky & Clouds lesson, Landscape Painting in Procreate

Save something brighter than everything else for the end, and use almost none of it. That rule alone will improve every sky you paint.

Which method to start with

If you're new to Procreate, paint the smudge-tool skyscape first. It teaches edge control, soft blending and the erase-as-paint habit with zero pressure, and the result is genuinely postable. If you've got some hours in the app, the oil method is the one that will change how your skies look, because it forces the shadow-reflection-warmth-highlight order that real light follows.

Both lessons come from larger courses. The skyscape is one exercise among the tool-by-tool projects in Freya's Procreate Masterclass, and the oil clouds are one slice of a full seascape in her Landscape Painting course, which goes on to paint the ocean, the land and the light as one scene with the same brush set. The free lesson on the oil landscape page is the natural next step if the second method pulled you in. Paint a sky this week and tag Freya when you share it, she really does look. 💛