Click here for the WIP.

Whew. This piece started as a Fool's cloud study in February. I spent some time trying to understand how he managed to make the clouds so realistic in his "Three Laughing Budas" piece. So I just started making the clouds as I usually do, with round blobs of color trying to block some forms of light and shadow. Then onto the refining part I used a Checkerboard dither brush to try to create some forms that would resemble Fool's. I was quite happy with the result after two weeks, but I wanted to make this piece more than just clouds, so I wanted to add more to that. I had many ideas like that road in Hawaii where you can drive at cloud level, but for that to work I would need to have thought of that from the beginning because of the perspective. Whilst searching for ideas, I saw a photo online of a mountain peak creeping through the clouds and everything was very blue and concise and I thought: "Yeah, this is it." The only problem was that my mountains aren't very good, so who is the best mountain pixeler I can think of to draw inspiration from? Adam was the easy answer here. So I went to Adam's twitter and saved his most recent pieces as inspiration. I tried to keep the palette small, so I challenged myself to stick to 7 colors. 5 for the clouds, 1 for the sky and I added one more to use in the mountain's shadow. The art from Adam had 10 colors for the mountain alone, so trying to interpret his technique while still having to work with a smaller palette was quite challenging.

Since I started this in february and I'm getting inspired by two artists I don't think this qualifies for the weekly challenge, so I'm not joining in, it's just a coincidence.
 

Anyway, I'm very happy with the result, and I hope you guys like it.