This is not a full tutorial – but more a guide or inspirational article – I don’t guarantee that you’ll be able to master the painting of clouds after reading this – but I believe that anyone who practise hard can accomplish anything – and for those willing to do so I belive that this could get you on the right track.

This tutorial require besides Photoshop also a digital drawing tablet (like a Wacom).

The first 4 steps illustrate the planning or layout faze of the process, the key here is to work fast without thinking about anything – just paint paint paint, don’t use Undo – just paint it over with fresh paint from the color picker (press down the alt key when using the brush tool). If you are using your brains too much – you’re doing it wrong. Don’t get “locked” into shaping up all clouds you initially painted – erase some and try again – negative space or in this case sky is just as important as the clouds. Use the sky color also as a means to shape the clouds. Use hard edge brushes instead of soft airbrushes – otherwise there’s a chance you lock onto the fine-tuning mode which you are trying to avoid. Use big chunky brushes for the same reason.

Eventually you’ll turn up with something that from a distance looks pretty decent. Here begins the Smudging. I start by smudging with great force (I really abuse my tablet) in the direction which I want the sky to shape up in. In this case I want the clouds in a sort of circular spiral shape. After that I start the, as it seems, never-ending process of: painting – smudging – painting – smudging – painting… There are no tutorials that can teach anyone how this works exactly – you have to hold the pen/brush yourself in order to get the right feel. Much is done on intuition – which comes from experience.

I see that a lot of people never try using different brushes with the smudge tool – I use a brush that looks fairly natural (it’s in the default set that comes with photoshop – it’s called “spatter 14 pixels” – I just turn up the size somewhat) – by not using the default brush I avoid getting too much of that photoshop smudge feel. Leave a few brushstrokes as they are and don’t smudge everything – smudge some stuff in the completely wrong direction – do zig-zag patterns with the smudge tool – play around and finally you get there.

The thing I find so intriguing about this whole procedure is that you can always make some detail look slightly better, so if you are picky you can never be satisfied with the result and could continue perfecting the image forever. But at some point you have to draw the line and the paradox here is that saying: “the sooner the better” applies here. So don’t let the perfectionist in you take control and just take the image to a point where you can say that it “looks like a cloud”.

With a more dramatic palette it could look like this…