Producing Cartoon Clouds in Photoshop

Without 3rd party plug ins, special filters or cloud-seeding helicopters.

This little tutorial was spawned by me on a boring Sunday morning when I came across this: How do I make cloud shapes? After trying to solve the poor guy's problem, I came up with this little method to produce sweet, cartoonish clouds in Photoshop.

The structure of a cloud

As usual, I approached problems by finding out more about the real stuff. I digged up some articles about volumetrics (e.g. clouds, fogs) in 3D software and how, in general, those software generated them.

After some light reading, the truth dawned upon me. Although clouds are not actually solids, we must treat them as if they were solids - in graphics software. That is because clouds are made up of water molecules grouped together in a loose cluster and they reflect and refract light like solid objects.

Fake solids it is, then

First, let us start by creating the basic shape of a cloud. First, select the Brush Tool go to the Brushes Palette and click on "Shape Dynamics". In the settings to the right, adjust "Size Jitter" to 100% and leave everything else as they are.

Now, choose a sharp round shape for the Brush Tip Shape. Then, do a few strokes on the canvas and your brush should produce something like this (minus the text):

The reason behind the "Size Jitter" configuration is obviously to let Photoshop automatically generate some "randomness" to our cloud shapes. After all, the water molecules in clouds don't line up properly, do they?

OK, now that we have a way of generating a cartoonish cloud shape without much effort, paint a cloud shape on a much larger canvas, so that it's easy to work on.

With that in mind, let's take a look at my cloud shape ;)

The rough procedure I followed to draw out the basic cloud shapes are:

1. With a bigger brush, block out the basic shape of the cloud
2. With a smaller brush, draw along the edges, so that the cloud appears more puffy
3. Repeat above steps until satisfied

Note: my cloud image above fills a 600 × 600 canvas completely. Remember to make your basic shape big enough so that you can work on it easily!

...And solids cast shadows

Since we are going to treat our cloud as a solid, we are going to cast some shadows with the cloud. First, CTRL + Click on our cloud shape layer.

Then, create a new layer and paint some dark shadows with a black brush. Paint it in such a way that it fills up the bottom half of the cloud.

Change the Layer Blending mode to "Overlay". With the selection still active, go to Filter > Gaussian Blur and choose a suitable amount that achieves the following effect:

Oops. Our cloud looks flat. No worries, I've a perfect solution for this:

In the image, notice that I zoomed in and doodled something on it. The black represents the shadows, the white represents highlights and the red represents the general outline of that particular portion of shadow.

Since we already have our shadow painted, all we have to do is just erase some shadow to make way for light! So, whip out the Eraser Tool with a soft tip and low opacity and erase the portions sketched white (on the cloud shadow layer)!

Conclusion and notes

If you repeat the above steps (shadows, then erase) suitably, what you should get in the end is a convincing cartoonish cloud.

This is only a very crude method only used by me to make some cute clouds quickly. If you are interested in creating photorealistic clouds in Photoshop, please visit the following links -- I highly recommend you doing so!

Photorealistic cloud painting links:

• Painting clouds: preparation
• Painting clouds: part 1
• Painting clouds: part 2