Photoshop Clouds

Please note that this tutorial is for the program Photoshop. If you are using a different program you may have some luck with the same technique, but your menus and tools will likely be different.

Before you begin laying down color figure out what direction you would like your clouds to move in. In this particular picture I want them at a very slight diagonal to cross with the direction of the lizard warrior.

So that it is easy to edit the clouds, I'm going to put them on their own layer just above the sky, but below all the rest of the foreground color.

I've found that a hard edged airbrush is the best way to create a fluffy texture. I've made my own size brushes by clicking "create new brush" in the brush menu and making a 300 pixel, a 100 pixel, and a 60 pixel hard edged brush.

I start by using the biggest brush I created, the 300 pixel brush. Using a 20% flow I make slow circles to create a light fluffieness in the background. It is from this abstract fluffiness that I will pull out cloud shapes. Since my sky is blue, I can pull out whitish clouds for better weather.

Raise the flow on the large brush to 30% and make circles along the tops of the airbrush shapes or wherever the light source is located. To make your clouds convincing they'll need to be lit in some way.

Switch to a smaller brush and define the edges of your clouds by really laying the value on their. It is at this point where you will choose what kinds of clouds you want. I love my fluffy cotton candy clouds because they allow you to put a lot of interesting shapes into them.

Continue to heavily define the edges lit by light sources.

Add more shape to the inside of the clouds so they are full and believable. If they are just fluff with really hard edges they won't work. I used my 100 pixel brush to do this because it is big enough that it doesn't streak, but small enough that I can be more exact with where I lay it.

It's very unlikely that clouds are just pure white, so work in some other colors. In this step I've added purple shadows to help define the lower portions of the clouds.

Last, I finish off the image with my light source, the sun, and cast purple's opposite, yellow, as the warm light source. I crest each of the edges with this color to make everything come together. These cloud effects where made with nothing but 3 different size hard edged airbrushes. A little bit goes a long way!