Sunbeams

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

■ Try five different techniques for painting skies with sunbeams

■ Follow a step-by-step process for painting different effects

■ Practise essential watercolour techniques

Imagine a torch beam in a dark dusty room, viewed from the side. The light catches all the dust particles in the air and produces a beam of light – if the air was pure, there would be no beam visible. This is exactly the same principle when sunbeams appear in the sky. Obscured sunlight breaks through little gaps in the clouds and then illuminates all the particles of water and dust in the air. Unlike a torch, the sun shines in all directions so the beams radiate outwards from a single point. The edges of the holes in the clouds that the sunlight breaks through are soft, so all the sunbeams have soft edges. Furthermore, the gaps in the clouds vary in size and opacity, so the width and intensity of the sunbeams varies too.

I am going to show you five methods that I know of that can be used to create sunbeams, all of which are demonstrated on the following pages. I have used the same colours for each