Cloudscapes
Sweeping landscapes and planetary marvels are mainstays of science fiction illustration, so it's little wonder that clouds and cloudscapes are a reoccurring theme.
Big billowing clouds can add depth and texture to any landscape, and in science fiction or space art, they're just as likely be swirling underneath the scene as they are to be towering above. Possibly more likely.
The most inventive use of a cloud has to go to John Berkey, for "Fire Sky," which I learned about recently after stumbling onto a 2019 auction listing for it. Here, there's a secret hidden above the cloud, although the city's inhabitants are likely too preoccupied to notice. As one reblogger put it on a tumblr tag, "love the idea of a nuclear explosion either manifesting as or being the manifestation of an elder god."
Most often, clouds were a quick way to show scale, like the one that passes by the middle of the tower on Mike Minor's illustration in Starlog, August 1979.
David A. Hardy's take on giant towers, his 1981 illustration ‘The Towers of Taban,’ doesn't even bother with anything underneath the clouds.
Tim White has one of the more gorgeous examples of clouds at the bottom of the frame, with this 1978 artwork titled ‘Vimana,’ scanned by Retro Sci-Fi Art from White's 1988 anthology The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White.
Setting a scene above a cloud bank separates it from the expected, normal order of life, giving the viewer a sense of eerie, liminal otherworldness. That makes it the perfect backdrop for a flying saucer, like this one from Peter Andrew Jones...
...or another artwork by Tim White.
Perhaps it's not a surprise that one of the many examples of a speculative fiction artist influencing an author centered around exactly this type of scene.
When Michael Whelan painted the “conference in the clouds” on his 1991 cover to Weyrworld, the seventh book in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, he only had a synopsis of what McCaffrey planned to write. She liked the scene so much that she then wrote it into the story.
Airbrush lovers like Colin Hay or Chris Foss had a lot of fun with the fuzzy shadows that come naturally to cloud banks.
The first one is Colin Hay; the second one is Chris Foss
This Chris Foss served as 1977 album art for Ian Gillan Band's Clear Air Turbulence, although this grainy version is taken from a 1995 trading card.
Peter Elson doesn't let the clouds obscure the planet below for his 1992 cover to Larry Niven's short story collection A Hole in Space.
And of course, what's a floating city without clouds swirling around it for atmosphere, pun intended? Here's Michael Böhme's “Station in the Clouds.”
The more well-known example is Star Wars' Cloud City, depicted here in a Ralph McQuarrie concept.
Ron Walotsky took a cue from the title of David F. Nighbert's Clouds of Magellan for his 1991 cover.
If artists needed an arresting image, they could always turn the entire cloud bank an unexpected color. Here are Chris Foss's blue clouds:
Michael Böhme's red clouds:
And Ralph McQuarrie's orange clouds, back at Cloud City once more.
For space artists, the clouds themselves could be their main focus, like this beautiful “Jupiter cloudscape,” by Adolf Schaller.
The same goes for NASA concept art, where clouds were visual signals of how the atmosphere would work in an artificial habitat. Don Davis explains one such case:
“One of my earliest Space Colony paintings was based on the giant ‘Model 3’ cylindrical habitats envisioned by Gerard O'Neill. I imagined the clouds forming at an ‘altitude’ around the rotation axis.”
Next time: Atlantis