the placement of the horizon
From a compositional point of view, you do not want to put the horizon right in the middle of the picture. The composition rule that this advice follows is to never make equal intervals of anything. If you put the horizon line in the middle, you would have equal sky and land. Not that famous painters have not broken this rule.
The Dutch painters who were the first to paint realistic skies (according to Cavin Pretor-Pinney the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society here) made two innovations. First of all, they painted their skies on blank canvas thus having an inventory of prepared skies, and added the landscape at another time. There’s something to be said for this. Artists (Constable is, perhaps, the best known) began to do cloud studies. It takes time to get it right with a complex and interesting sky, and splitting the task into two (clouds and land) makes sense.
Secondly, the Dutch dropped the horizon very low to make what might be called a skyscape painting.
The other possibility is to raise the horizon over the middle. This does two things. It makes the horizon look further back, so the clouds have to be smaller, and it puts the viewer off his or her feet either lying down or up in the air.
As we have seen, the sky is not a wall behind our painting but more a ceiling. As such there will be issues of perspective. In discussing the color of the sky, we were at the same time considering atmospheric perspective, so on this page I want to begin discussing linear perspective, on this page one-point perspective.
single clouds
To suggest a receding sky on a sunny day it’s best not to paint a lone cloud running horizontally, parallel with the horizon, that is all the same width. You might want to tip it up or down a bit and narrow on end.
Multiple clouds
As clouds receded toward the horizon they should get smaller. As on land, there should be a vanishing point on the horizon. Multiple clouds should be designed to make the recession of the sky easy to read.
This photo illustrates single point perspective pretty well.
This page has the following sub pages.
