Clouds and Perspective
Perspective in Nature
By now we are all familiar with linear perspective for objects such as fences, roads, and buildings. What many beginning landscape painters don't realize is that perspective can also be used to better understand how clouds are often organized in the sky and how noticing and using this can be used to communicate depth.
In the diagram below, one can see familiar red lines noting linear perspective for boxes or simple planes as well as for posts of a fence or telephone poles. In the sky one can see many grey rectangles. The grey rectangles in the sky represent simplified clouds. I have placed a kind of perspective grid for the clouds with magenta lines. As one looks from the top of the page downward toward the horizon line, one can see that the space betweent the magenta grid lines gets smaller and smaller. This is because the lower the clouds the farther away they are (and when something is farther away, it is smaller. We know that from what we learned about linear perspective with fence poles and other objects).
In the photos below, can you see the that the clouds follow this diagram in terms of approximate scale and location in the sky? BTW, this works best with cumulus clouds (the puffy cotton-like clouds), but perspective can also be seen with other kinds of clouds such as cirrus.
In practice
Below, Jason Tako employs this knowledge in his painting titled, Big Sky. Notice the flat bottoms that are rendered with a darker value.