Introduction

Welcome to my tutorial on drawing different weather conditions of a place.

 

Weather & climate attracts mood and vibes to your art.

When illustrating a particular weather you must first take note of the characteristics of the weather, sunny skies its a good characteristic of summer while cloudy sky is for winter. You should also know that weather doesn't affect just the sky, the environment also gives the mood of the weather.

I hope find this tutorial helpful.

Sunny day (summer environment)

Sunny days is a good characteristic of summer weather and it is one of the easiest to illustrate.

 

I already painted a building with a brick fence already, I will explain how I illustrate the environment to suit my preferred weather.

Note: since I have a summer environment in mind, it will be absurd if there is no grass because weather affects the environment.

Firstly, I painted the ground with a brownish color. I didn't detailed the ground because I will eventually paint over it when illustrating the grass.

Paint with green color over the ground to illustrate the grass. Don't forget to take note of the perspective.

 

Here is the brush I used;

Start detailing the grasses, I used the default grass brush on CSP to add little grass details on the image.

Note: add more details to the foreground and decrease the details as you move from the mid ground to the background to create depth.

Even without drawing the cloud one can predict the weather condition of the environment.

To create a clear sky fill the it with a fairly dark blue color.

Brighten the bottom side and darken the upper side to give a gradation.

Now that it looks like a clear sky you can start adding clouds, make sure you don't ignore the perspective. I made the smaller clouds in the farther side and increase the size as it moves nearer.

Note: I used material brush from the asset store to add clouds you can draw yours to match your art style

 

Here is the link to the material if you're interested

Since it's a clear sky that produces light brighten the farther side of the painting and then you are done.

Rainy day

A raining day will always be cloudy and also darker because the clouds will block the light that the sun emits. Now that we know the characteristic of the rainy weather, it will be easy to put it into our illustration.

Fill the sky with a darker blue color, you can also decrease the saturation of the initial sky color with tonal correction.

Create a new layer on top of all the initial layer and fill it with a total black color, reduce the opacity of the layer to something around 50. This will make the image look dark and it will add a different vibe to your art.

To paint the cloud, select a muted yellow color and start filling the sky with the colour to illustrate a cloudy sky.

Pick a dark grey color and start adding it to the bottom of the sky.

If you are not satisfied with the result you can edit it using tonal correction or by creating a correction layer till you get your best result.

Let's add more dynamism to the illustration, I used the default tool on CSP to add rain to the illustration.

Make sure yo duplicate the layer and transform it a number of time to get the best result.

You can also add some lightening flashes , depends on your choice though.

Snowy day

This one gives winter vibes. The sky is often white on snowy days because of the snow fall.

Use the same sky that you used while painting sunny sky but this time set the cloud layer to add glow to brighten up the sky.

Now, create a new layer on top of the illustration folder and set the blending mode to add glow, use a soft brush to add snows to the sky to illustrate falling snows.

Note: there will be no need for blurring since soft brush is used.

Create another layer and start applying snows on the grass, roof of the house and the fence using a soft brush.

Here is the timelapse of the process.

Importance of weather when painting character

Weather gives your character a new vibe, your illustration might seem a bit incomplete or absurd if the weather didn't match emotion of the character. You can use weather to emphasize the emotional of a character.

Here is a character that I designed, I will show how to use weather painting to emphasize her emotions.

I added background to the image. then create a new layer and filled it with a total black colour then I decreased the opacity

I darken the background a bit to shift attention to the character when viewing the illustration.

I started adding rain drops to illustrate the weather conditions of the area

I edited the color tone of the character by creating a new correction layer>level correction to make the character look a wet.

 

Here is the final result of the process, as we can see the weather condition we created emphasizes the emotion of the girl.

Final note

The first tip to know when illustrating any weather is it's characteristic, also make sure you use reference to boost your imagination.

Thanks very much for reading this short tutorial I hope it helps you in a way. Goodluck.