The Cloud Template: It's not just art - it's a blueprint
Learn the reason why I've been drawing nothing but clouds and the deeper strategy behind it!
For the past few months, I’ve been drawing NOTHING but clouds.
You may be wondering- so here’s why.
The Grand Vision
My main vision is Learn Indie, a place where game-developers (and creative people) can find the information and resources they need, as quickly and easily as possible. The information will be sourced from indies who live and breathe their niche skill.
I’ll write a post about it so keep an eye out for it!
Before any fancy app or tutorial content is created for Learn Indie, 2 things must be tested:
What topic/resource do Game-Devs need?
How do I become the BEST at a specific niche, in the shortest time possible?
Once these 2 questions are answered, we will have a blueprint to create tutorials from. The process of creating a tutorial is an art in itself, so that process will be for future posts.
What do Game-Devs Need?
Clouds
I chose to hyper focus on Clouds for 3 reasons:
I’m a VFX artist so I’m naturally inclined to draw nature
The topic is broad enough for beginners to dabble in
Clouds are a foundational topic for more advanced topics
And so, on Feb 28th of 2026, I committed to drawing Clouds. The first few weeks were quite frustrating because they weren’t as awesome as I have hoped.
But by the 1 month mark, I was comfortable enough to share a screenshot on Reddit and Twitter.
The results blew my expectations out the water- each post got over 4k likes within 2 days! From my past experience, random posts can explode on Twitter but not so much on Reddit.
So I knew that I was onto something, and that I had to double down. The next step is figuring out how to improve as quickly as possible.
How to improve as quickly as possible?
Intentional practice & documentation
I knew something had to change if I wanted any chance at improving quicker. Here are 3 things I immediately implemented:
1. Daily Notes
When I post daily drawings on Streak.club, I only include a title, relevant tags, and an image. I figured the quickest change I can implement is writing a note to every daily entry. This allows my mind to materialize abstract concepts into words, right before bed.
2. Structured Studies
Instead of drawing things on a whim, I’ve decided to structure the clouds by themes. Each theme consists of a set drawing style, color count, and palette. Variations of the theme includes size and shape style.
This allows me to study one thing at a time and gradually progress to different themes/styles as I master the current style.
And in doing so, these Clouds can then be distributed as asset packs using the same structure.
3. Explain the process, live on Twitch
I’ve read from the book, The Science of Accelerated Learning, that teaching is the most effective way of retaining knowledge.
So I set up OBS, reused some assets I had laying around, and went Live. Getting viewers without much social reach was quite difficult but I was blessed enough to have a handful of chatters.
I explained my thought process as I drew, and the fact that I was live kept me focused on the task at hand.
I’ve only done 2-3 stream thus far but the overall experience has been extremely positive. I connected with old and new faces, got a ton of work done, and have improved my skills much quicker.
Final Thoughts
This Cloud Template Series isn’t a one off thing- it’s a foundation for Game developers to build & learn from!
I’ll talk about my Youtube content strategy and share how the journey goes.
Thank you for reading if you got this far into the blog post!