SKYBOUND
Paint Clouds and Cultivate Wonder
If you want to paint but feel uninspired or unsure where to begin, this is your invitation to look up.
Skybound is a beginner-friendly online course focused on painting clouds with gouache. It offers simple, grounding techniques while creating space to reconnect with curiosity and the quiet urge to make art again.
Clouds make the perfect subject. They are expressive, unpredictable, and full of form and atmosphere. When you spend time studying them, you start to experience more wonder, not just in the sky, but in your own life and creative process. Wonder feeds the soul, and painting the sky is one way to foster the art spirit.
In this course, Katy demonstrates step by step how to work with the velvety opaque watercolor known as gouache (pronounced “gwash”), from choosing materials, to designing shapes, to layering color. You will get short, practical video lessons walking you through each project, printable templates and handouts, image references, and a few optional journal prompts to help you connect your painting practice to your sense of wonder.
By the end of Skybound, you’ll have a collection of cloud paintings along with a deeper understanding of value, color, design and composition. But most importantly, you will have spent time nourishing your creative spark.
All you need to do is look up. Wonder awaits you.
What You’ll Receive in Skybound:
4 guided modules:
Module 1: Seeing the Sky with Wonder
You’ll learn how to truly observe the sky —the types of clouds, understanding how they form, how artists have painted clouds throughout history, and how to begin seeing them with fresh eyes.
Module 2: Possessing the Sky with Paint
Build confidence with gouache through foundational exercises, a guided value study, and your first structured cloud painting project broken into clear, manageable steps.
Module 3: Designing Dynamic and Dimensional Clouds
Move beyond copying references and learn how to design your own clouds with depth and movement. Includes blending techniques and a fully guided project.
Module 4: Painting Colorful Clouds
Say goodbye to dull, lifeless clouds! Learn how sunlight shapes color in the sky, how to mix luminous chromatic neutrals and create colorful clouds that capture the time of day. Includes cloud color theory exercises, a guided project, and a bonus master study demo.
Downloadable PDFs, templates, and photo reference packs
Over 4+ hours of step-by-step instruction, with welcome and reflection videos designed to guide you and help you get the most from each module.
Access to the Skybound Loft, our private online community
Lifetime access
The waitlist is now closed.
Founding Member enrollment is opening privately.
Public enrollment opens March 18.
About the Instructor
Katy fell in love with clouds while studying abroad in the Netherlands as an art student. Later, studying the Impressionists deepened that fascination.
Though she works as an illustrator and landscape artist across many subjects, Katy continually returns to clouds. Painting them is her way of creating for the joy of it.
With over fifteen years of teaching experience as a college art professor, including leading curriculum development as a department head, Katy brings clarity, experience, and care to her lessons, demonstrations, and feedback.
She created Skybound because clouds invite us to look up, notice beauty again, and reconnect with a quiet sense of enchantment that daily life so easily erodes. Through painting clouds, she believes we do not just build skill, we become more present and fully alive.
