Trouble painting clouds :(

#1

I’ve been banging my head against this wall for weeks, and it shouldn’t be this hard. Hopefully someone here can help. I’m working on a 5 page comic story for an anthology. For colors, I’m using PS and a Bamboo tablet.

The story is about this robot who is searching for something, and at the beginning it’s supposed to be kind of a darker feel as he searches. I wanted to have some kind of stylistic stormy type clouds. I’m not really looking for realistic so much as an interesting style - something of a mix of the two I guess.

I had come up with this, which I am not happy with. Some of the other artists liked it but I don’t feel it fits the story, and plus, I can’t seem to reproduce it well anyway.

Looking at Marvel’s limited run of the Wizard of Oz, I love the colorists work there. On these two panels, they do a sky that is something that I think would work:

Unfortunately, I have tried and tried - literally for hours over weeks to paint stuff like this and I’m more frustrated than you can imagine - I can’t seem to replicate this. Especially the top panel here, I really like.

I’ve done I don’t know how many tutorials and tried to match lots of stuff I searched on. I don’t know if I am choosing the wrong brushes or doing the wrong techniques or what.

So, my cry for help is this - is there anyone who can help me figure out how to paint clouds like this, particularly in the top frame of Oz here?

Suggestions about how the sky might be cool here too are welcome. I want to do something interesting that supports the story that he is searching in something of a ravaged land.

#2

Hey,

i had some working results with the cloud brushes that nathie has for download. Hope that helps :slight_smile:

#3

Everything looks too soft in your panels. The clouds are soft, and the line between ark and light on your mountains is soft, too. If you want to imitate the lower work, you need to use a hard brush and resist too much blending.

#4

I know my cloud edge is more complex than the Oz comic above, but I tried to make it in a similar vein.

I used a round brush, pale, hard, size and opacity set to pressure.

I set the brush blend mode to multiply and built up density in the cloud with multiple strokes, like a watercolor.

I turned brush blend mode back to normal and did a little more sky-onto-cloud and vice versa…

#5

Thanks jfrancis! Very helpful. Took me awhile to get back to this, busy with other things. Also thanks Daimonie for the brush tip, I will check them out. :slight_smile:

#6

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