One way to add this effect to your designs is to spend hours creating them from scratch.

By using combinations of pastel and neutral colors, this subtle technique allows designers to imbue their designs with a natural, fresh, and spring-like feel. You can also do a google image search for 'clouds transparent backgrounds' and turn those into brushes.The watercolor effect is one of the most popular design styles in graphic design. Make a selection of it, preferably after removing the background, and then going to Edit > Define Brush Preset. To do that, you just crop an image to a cloud you like. In some of his posts he says he's using photos of clouds and converting them into a Photoshop Brush. Just like finger painting, the tones travel with your next smudge stroke causing some blending to mix together. This allows you to not only smudge, but pick up some of the shades from the last few pixels you smudged. Using about 50% pressure in the options bar.Īfter this I used the smudge tool set to about 10%, and turn on the finger painting option. Use the Smudge Tool, also using a textured brush, to blend, swirl, and move things around. ABR Adobe Brush I used to make this.Īfter getting the blocking in for the shape and shades. I started with a dark tone and worked my way towards light, similar to the samples you mentioned. So using a mixture of a textured brush I made this first by painting with the textured brush and building up my tones.

After that it's a mixture of texture brushes, or smudging, throughout all the samples I've seen on DeviantArt. A shadow portion, a strong highlight portion and a middle tone blending between the two. It's painterly, and usually involves 3 main areas of tone. What makes the clouds so great is the approach. If you look at this sample of his work, there are some clear indicators that they are using a mixture of texture brushes, and also the smudge tool in PS to flick some little wisps off the edges of the clouds.

Cloud brushes photoshop deviantart