Can anyone help get me started on how to do a cloudy night sky? I have a design I’m working on that really needs a cloudy night sky in the background of the main image … but I have never done anything like this before and honestly don’t know how to get started. What kind of shapes to use? Gradients? Colors? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.
I’m no master painter but I did a Zach Sobiech Clouds tribute which included clouds as you might guess
You can’t really see the detail with the overlaying vinyls and the in game version is actually alot less cartoony than this photo makes it look… Anyway I used paint splat shapes to fill in the backgrounds and used the soft circle gradient shapes layered to give it soft edges, adjusting the opacity over and over to keep it from looking spotty… Even the highlights/shadows were made from the same gradient… When I was finished I used a large gradient circle underneath the clouds that was a bit darker and slightly different than the base color to make them stand out a bit more because the soft edges lost their detail against a flat background due to adjusting the opacity… For a night sky I would use mid to deep grays for the clouds with light blue and orange along with white for moon highlights and black shadows underneath… Maybe some of this will help…
Aside from that I would PM xX PACMAN 2Xx his shading is unmatched as far as I’ve seen, and he just did a space livery so I’m sure he experimented with night sky/light needed to pull this off (clearly shows in his finished product). A large amount of his previous paints included clouds or similar shapes. Best of luck
Eidolon, appreciate the tips. I’ll give it a try and see what I can come up with.
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Can you point us to an image that shows the style you are going after, are you going for realism? I mostly always use soft edge shapes when creating clouds because I prefer a softer look in the background. There are instances when I went with all solids for the shape and then used soft shapes for highlights, mainly when I attempt a comic book style.
Mess around with the transparency slider, increments of 20 are good. Take some photos of the sky and try replicating them. Watch some of the waterpainting tutorials on youtube to get an idea of how to build up a painting from the background forwards to create depth. It all depends on how many layers you want to devote to them too I didn’t have many left when I did these ones
This is close to what I was thinking of. Just some random clouds in a sky with some stars … but not too many clouds. Not going for anything photo-realistic … kind of cartoony … but a dark and serious cartoony … if that makes sense. The primary character in the image is a cartoon character … but a dark character.
Dragon … my paint is nowhere near as complex or detailed as yours (which is awesome by the way). I’m still learning.
Use gradient shapes I suppose
Looks a lot like the background to Jubes Silver Surfer.
Forgetting about trying to make the stars chrome for the moment. Start with a black background and work forward. Grade the black into a very dark purple/blue at the bottom. Put in the dim furthest away stars, then the bright ones then move forward through the layers of the cloud. If you have a moon in the picture remember the clouds will be lit from that direction. You could probably do the whole thing with the circle gradient but would be really wasteful doing all the stars individually. Try to avoid using repeating patterns.
hey wildcat bud, i have uploaded a quick tutorial on how I do basic clouds, it may help, then again it may not lol
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Thanks everyone for all the tips. And Gr333nz, that video is really helpful. I looked at a couple of your other videos and you have a great collection of paints there … great work.
Cheers mate and no problem, glad it helped 
Much thanks to everyone offering tips and advice here for me. Tinkered around with your suggestions and am pretty satisfied with the results so far. May need to practice more adding some more realistic colors … but for this design, I only wanted to use a single color to highlight the clouds. A little sneak peak here at my WIP for those who helped me with the cloudy night sky background. If you have any other suggestions after seeing where I am now … don’t hesitate to offer them up.
Working on a tribute design to Batman as it’s his 75th birthday this year …
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Looks really good man, excellent job so far
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+1! Looks really good !