Cartoon Clouds
In this tutorial I will show how to draw some really nice cartoonish clouds.
Open a new "document", 480px x 320px:
Use the paint bucket tool to fill the background with a nice blue color. (I used #3f72c6)
Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool:
And make sure you are using these settings:
And now for the "fun" part:
Select an area like this:
Choose the gradient tool:
And use these settings:
(Press the D key to select the default colors.)
Now, let's imagine that the light (sun) comes from the top left corner of the image. So we want the cloud to be lighter at the top left and darker (shadow) on the bottom left.
So while the circle is still selected, use the Gradient Tool to fill it like this:
That should give you something like this:
Repeat these steps and make many small gradient-filled circles like this.
Remember to draw the circles from the top and work your way down until you get something like this:
For the final step, we're simply just going to add some simple blur:
Filter->Blur->Gaussian blur...
And that's it!
Just play around with this and you'll get great results.
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