Back to basics and cloud practices

Tree practice proved difficult as the trees in the garden are too close to simplify and as I don't want to end up painting individual leaves, so I thought I'd turn to cloud practice. We don't have great big vistas, more's the pity, so these are glimpsed up between trees.

Figuring it would be difficult, I decided to just do monotone sketches and concentrate just on tonal values. Bit of a rubbish start, but so what. 

It's wonderful just using one colour: a) you don't care how it turns out so you are not precious b) quick set up and clean up c) you can squeeze in little sketch in a spare fifteen min or so and d) hopefully by not thinking about colour, you can think about something else i.e brushstrokes, paint texture, lunch. 

I may well be deluding myself, but I'm seeing progress here at the end of a week of various attempts. 

I tried some colour then and lost all that simplicity. Mind you, it was a complicated, ever changing, temperamental autumnal sky. It is quite mental trying to look, mix and paint when the subject is moving away and morphing into something else. 

This was looking south, so things were a bit backlit. I never really thought about directional cloud lighting before, now I'm continually looking at it and boring P about it when we are walking.