Painting clouds, the lazy way

Required stuff:

• A tablet
• Photoshop 7+ and the following brushes:
  • hard round (7% spacing, in use 99% of the time),
  • soft round,
  • one of those fancy spatter-like brushes.
  - all with 100% base flow and opacity, but varied by pen pressure.
• Patience. Lots of it.

The walkthrough

1. Firstly, I planned out my cloud composition and created the base sky gradient that'll get smoothed later.

2. Then I started doodling some shapes that should resemble clouds using the fancy brush so that they wouldn't be so sterile.

3. COPYPASTA MAGIX TIME. I dug through my stock archive and picked a few nice stocks to create a collage that'd look like my sketch and toyed around with their colour/contrast/etc.

4. Added hints of other colours with a big, soft brush and started painting with the hard brush like mad, <3<3<3 the colour picker.

5. Still painting it all over, adding more detail to the lower clouds.

6. It's COPYPASTA TIME again! Pasted more clouds on the left and started painting them over, plus I painted in some clouds in the right corner that should look like those on the left.

7. Almost done with the clouds, refining the blending and some highlights. Note that I did NOT use the soft brush when blending and left quite a few hard edges.

8. ...and it's done. However, there are many places for improvement (better low clouds, more blending, etc.), but it was the 3rd attempt at clouds and I simply ran out of patience.