Clouds Tutorial.

[Marb]

This tutorial will show you how easy it is to create cloudlike figures in Adobe Photoshop Cs2.

1. Use the gradient tool on the background to create a flow from darkish blue to lighter blue or even white. (Simply select one of each on the back and foreground colors.

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/4120/cloud15pk.jpg

2. Create a layer. (Layer>New>Layer or Ctrl+Shift+N.) Get out the brush tool.
It's color will have to be white or white-ish. Max opacity and flow.
Hardness and size both at thirty. (Right click the background of your new layer to adjust these easily.) Then draw bars of white in the upper 33% or 25% of the image like so:

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/6402/cloud22gb.jpg

3. Get out smudge tool. Make sure the 'Affect all layers' is enabled in the bar below File, Edit etc. (In the Blur dropdown box.) I used a size of 10px and a hardness of 15%. (Strength was 72%) Then slowly draw circles around the upper edge of the pre-clouds. (I went from left to right.) The result should be something like this:

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/9710/cloud36xi.jpg

4. Then you decrease the size of smudge tool to like 5px and go around the upper edges once more, but paying a lot more attention to detail inside the cloud. (Note: You don't have to do circles anymore.)

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/951/cloud46mr.jpg

5. Duplicate the layer and apply brighter levels. (Ctrl+L) Then create a radial blur aimed down (Amount:100), to create some sunlike rays.

http://img396.imageshack.us/img396/2960/cloud59pk.jpg

Of course, you can make more and more of these, and make them much much bigger. Add better rays, maybe even a grassy field... but I'll leave that to you. :)

[Cleary]

Nice, Looks really good, but to much clicking.

[Marb]

If you'd have given me longer than a freaking minute to fix the links..

[Dividedpower]

Looks nice overall, better than most 'cloud' tutorials I've seen.

Then again, the majority of them say "Render > Clouds" your done.

[Marb]

Imho this looks better than Render > Clouds.

[Dividedpower]

The clouds render doesn't even look like clouds.

[Forsaken]

Render>Clouds is supposed to look like a picture of clouds taken from directly above looking down - works esp. well with screen and a city pic underneath or something. But all it really is is a random generator.

Nice tutorial. Now lets try and figure out how to draw a sunset :P