Concept Development - Clouds

Starting this task with a black background will allow me to gain the highlight information, observed at the edges of a cloud. Using a soft round brush, with shape dynamics added, I began dappling white information in a general cloud shape. Eventually this will give the cloud the speckled highlight effect that I had seen in my reference images.

 Further dappling with a chalk style brush, following the shape of the cloud, gave me the fluffy parts of the cloud whilst filling in any transparent areas. Complete coverage is not necessary at this point because the application of filters should fill the space in for me.

 Applying a blur filter and a median filter over the top of that gave me the beginnings of a cloud formation. You can start to see where the highlight and shadow information will be present on the cloud.

The cloud needed breaking up a little more. In order to achieve this I added noise to the layer. The noise filter creates a very obvious effect, making me realise that I needed to tone this down at a later stage.

A tilt-shift blur was then added. This spread out the cloud even further and removed some of that obvious noise information. At this point I was happy with the shape and look of the cloud but more work was needed to make it believable.








Repeating the above steps and adding more information with chalk brushes, I was able to attain the detail that you see here. Once this was completed and I was happy with the results, a brush preset was created from this information. To do this I had to invert the colours, as brush presets use black information.




The final result of the custom brush applied to a blue background is impressive, although some of the highlight and shadowing looks slightly incorrect. I could continue to work on the brush preset but I believe that this gives a good base to work with when painting concept art. The brush works by using a low transparency for areas of the cloud that are more dense, meaning that the colour of the sky behind it shows through. This means that the brush may not work as well on digital sunset paintings but you could work into the cloud on a separate layer to achieve the same effect.