It’s tempting to just pick a nice warm blue and cover the sky in your painting with it. The fact is, the sky is not just blue, but a whole rainbow of colors depending on which direction you are looking and the condition of the atmosphere on any given day.
The Earth’s Atmosphere is Made of Curtains of Moisture
The earth’s atmosphere is a receiver of light, and it acts
as a diffuser of light. It is composed of suspended moisture in the form of
gases that veil our view like a series of thin curtains. The veil of moisture
fluctuates from dense to light as the weather patterns and the moisture in the
atmosphere changes. Looking through the
atmosphere from a close distance, the view is decidedly clear and sharp. It is
for the most part colorless. As the distance increases and the atmosphere
becomes thicker, it takes on an opaque blue cast. This blue affects the darks
and near darks more than it does the lighter tones. However white or
near-whites take on a slightly warmer, darker tone as they recede into the
distance because of the particles in the atmosphere.
The Sky Rainbow
In this picture, viewing the sky from different angles on a
long flat plain, you can see how the density of the atmosphere affects its
color. At the zenith, which is approximately 100 miles straight up, the color
is a true violet-blue, but as the angle lengthens, the color changes. It
becomes warmer and lighter as the air becomes more veiled with the suspended
gases.
The color gradually shifts from violet blue, to true blue, to green-blue. At sixty degrees, it becomes a yellow-green, then orange-yellow, and near the horizon, it turns into a rose-gray hue. This rose-gray hue turns darker as it approaches the horizon, transforming to a hazy warm rose-gray. The reason that it turns darker at the horizon is that the atmosphere is at its densest, and any color or light seen through it has to penetrate a thicker veil of gases. For this reason, when the sun sets, it appears to turn into a red ball.
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