Clouds & Atmosphere Painting Tutorial - Digital Painting Basics - Concept Art

hello everyone and welcome to another tutorial from evident design at the moment I'm doing my best to keep providing you guys with more free painting tutorials but I'm also currently working as a composer and illustrator and I'm working on several courses for our evident online school such as the new trailer music course and a music creation basics course that's soon out but I'm also creating a concept art online course that covers all the fundamentals for becoming a concept artist in the industry and you know learning Photoshop painting basics lots of lots of tips and tricks and so on so sign up on the on a design newsletter to stay tuned for that so back to the subject for this tutorial in this video I'll be demonstrating how to paint clouds and achieve more atmosphere in your paintings clouds fog smoke and mist are really effective to add in your paintings to make them look more atmospheric if you paint them nicely it increases the overall quality of your painting you know I love painting clouds so thank you Bob Ross and you know it's it's not that hard to achieve it just requires some practice so let's just get into it so let's start by making a new document I'm using 2000 by 1000 as usual it works pretty good and I wanted to start with a regular landscape painting and I want to add some heavy clouds to it so it looks like a cloudy misty day the clouds will help my mountains look more immense and the fog it just adds more atmosphere to it so let's start by creating a simple speed painting with the landscape so we can start by adding a new layer or just using the background but actually let's just use the background and as usual I don't like painting on complete whites so I'll just reduce it a little bit and I'll choose some brush here to just quickly add in some colors I always try to use muted colors like around this area right here so we zoom out a little bit just paint in some stuff and you can get this brush back at at the evident website I'll provide a link in the description just click you're painting something get some more blue something that and I don't want to start with the clouds yet I just want to do the speed painting first so see let's use this one and I'll start off by making a little bit more clean lines here so there's our horizon line just something quick here and then can do the mountains right here and as usual remember to look up here in the Navigator so you can see how the how the painting sort of looks as a composition just add some more value up here before we start with our clouds and then I like to flip the screen and I'm I have it hot keyed to command H on Mac or ctrl H on PC maybe do a little river here just because whoops alright see some of the stuff up here it's really nice to use the lasso tool for this stuff I know it's supposed to be a cloud tutorial but I get carried away sometimes all right here we go all right so if we start by looking at this actually wait let me just look if to see if we're all good here sorry about that guys just wanted to check everything was okay with the recording so let's just say that we want to have some some clouds here now to just to just give this some more atmosphere just fix this up a little bit right here I want to start with some big shapes so I can do a new layer here and I can start with just like regular soft brush right here I have two different ones so I'm just using this one and I want to start with lighter clouds first so I can even do a little bit lighter than my sky here so I'll color pick right there and I have a new layer here and I'll just increase this a little bit and then I can start painting in some clouds just some soft brush here that's enough all the way there just try to get the big shapes first something like that and then I can pick my cloud brushes here I have many different tile bushes so you want to start off with something round and big but not too detailed like if you look at this one it's too detailed the same with this so maybe this one is good start color pick again and then we can try using some darker values like from the sky here which lights it's too too bright right now so I can do it a little bit darker and then you want to sort of look at clouds and kind of figure out how they look it's always important and I don't really have a no good idea with what I'm how I'm actually painting all this because it's so much about looking at actual and how how realistic things look and then I change the different sizes just try to give it a shape it's more horizontal you know down here then it is up here because clouds cannot rise up in some way and you see I'm how I'm concealing the mountains behind here that makes it look like very big in ominous I can do some more stuff like this it's important to have some sort of contrast from the sky but also blend it in in some places so it looks natural and really up there take some smaller here and do some more detail detail clouds just dotting in small cloudlets man I sound like Bob Ross that's awesome and same here because this is kind of a focal point right here make it a little bit more horizontal down here and as I said like you want to start with having somewhat of a brighter value first because then you can start you can start making this darker afterwards so if we start doing like some if I take this this layer here and we can press this lock transparent pixels right there and we take a darker value here like from the start but even darker than the sky so we can do something like that maybe now I increase the brush try a different brush for this maybe this one and just paint in under it more because the light would mostly be from the sky and not from the ground a little bit under here around the edges and remember I'm I'm using lock transparent pixels so it doesn't paint anywhere else just on the clouds and then here we can have a really dark we even live a darker here have some highlights up there let's try using an even darker because it's kind of stormy stormy look at them see here's a little bit too dark there we go and I can remove this lock transparent pixels and you see now I have some clouds up here and I can start working further on this I mean this is kind of cool as it is but if you want to add more you can just take some cloud brush here yeah I have different ones maybe this one's kind of cool now and also a very important thing to notice is that you know when you paint this sort of misty stuff you with soft brush you get more values to put paint details with and you can do more with it because if you just if you just have like a few values and like this and this these are very hard value contrasts and not this soft transition you won't have that much freedom to do what you want but now we have a lot of values to choose from so you should start using the brighter stuff here do a little bit less here as to too detailed see how I'm getting contrast between the darkness here and the lighter here can even you even less detail like this one and so using the beginning this off turn it out a bit and blend it a bit more with the landscape can even do something like this where you take the soft brush I like this one and we paint with quite a dark like we pick this value here and we do it even darker maybe or something like that make it a bit smaller do just under here so it was kind of like a rain can even use some some more texture brush here to to actually make it look like rain so and then just try to blend them together a bit more you don't have to use flower brushes you can just use regular ones and try to plant these fluffy things here I'm adding even some more highlights here so it was like clouds are separating each other but don't do too much contrast consulting it out more with the soft brush so now we can just take these two together merge them and what I said earlier is it's kind of cool to have this a lot of different values in the paintings because then you can start doing stuff like you know you can take your your burn tool right here make it even darker under your keys shadows like that and up here we can do darker even try mid-tones and then we can paint more details under it so we have more values to play with here and then can maybe do a little bit brighter behind there and now it looks like something is like this mountains is finishing right here and then behind there is another mountain which we can do another cool thing that's come atmospheric we can take the last tool I press L and it gives mark that just do something like that hit B for brush and then use a soft brush and then just take a lighter value something like this and then start painting a little bit like this and you see how maybe that was even too much can erase a little bit more just something like that maybe even to one value more behind here so I'm just using the values to to give me some more details and separation between the mountains use the dark ones up here some more details yeah so it's it's just it's kind of free really to to paint these these clouds I mean they're just free shapes basically and it's cool to paint them together with the with the mountains to make them look so you know more bigger because they now the mountains to a canopy with this and you can also like add more mists to it by taking just a soft brush using the cloud or even the sky and then just softly painting over you can even do something like like we did before where we trait where take we're taking just one section and we're marking it like that and then just adding some more behind there keeping that we can do some cloud stuff here as well maybe even use a little bit more detail try all that one that one this one okay this is a really weird brush but it's really good and remove I press command-d to remove their just blend that in a little bit more so it's not such a harsh edge it's a bit too bright here so I'm just color picking it's a really cool brush do the same here you then just pick it a little bit more you can even use like with a lasso tool you can use a feather here then it'll be more more soft when you when you do this stuff but I kind of like it hard and then then softening it out you know something that clean edges are really good in in painting then we continue just adding some more just missed you know making it even further away I don't really like this part here so just start try painting that away it's too gray can do this feather thing maybe two pixels oops hit B just very slightly like that and it's a softer edge there and you see all these values they come from the adding clouds and mist and stuff I get so many more values to play with here to paint with like that then maybe now we can try some more dark values under here maybe really darkening down this mountain there so we get paint some more details it's a little bit too much details over here because we don't and we don't want that but we want to have more details in the middle here otherwise it's going to be too much details everywhere so we can just start brushing that out a little bit so we can also add some more lighting to this so we can use dodge tool right there and let's say like this is the sun is shining from from here or something we can start like lighting up a few of these areas right here actually let's just use the brushed the brush right there and do a new later hit line our linear dodge and choose linear dodge here as well and then choose a dark orange color like that make it more red and then change back to normal do a new layer and now the clouds are can lit from from behind take the same color maybe even make it more green and highlight some of these areas maybe that's too green take the same here you can make this part more lit up you just got lit up good show so I know I always do this where I I'm supposed to just talk about clouds but it's good to show you some other stuff to be more here you said something like that maybe even light up up here together with the clouds so I can use a little bit more red so it's good to have this in mind where you want your lighting before because now I have the clouds here so they kind of make it a bit harder for me to to really get it as I wanted then I can add a new layer linear dodge this like we did before and just take the same color like that start lighting up a bit maybe even more color and then paint over the clouds so you see that sort of adds more atmosphere to to your painting and it's really good to do this stuff you know play around with these shapes and stuff and something else you can do is basically you could use photos as well and that's a pretty good thing to do when we were painting with clouds you just remove these here maybe yeah it's just you can basically just take some photos and add in here and then paint off those so if you just remove this again yeah you could get you could take some photos and I have a few different one here some skies and maybe use an overcast then check around for something you like maybe maybe this one drop that right in there I just want to use this part here so I can just that rasterize it use command alt and are and then just take this part command C remove then c'mon V now I can place that in here like that and then start erasing and then I have some more some more colors values and stuff to play with play I can paint on it's right here so I can make these clouds even bigger use and then I want to try to have things pointing inwards like this because if they're like you know like that or and I maybe just continue like this it doesn't want to look that good things need to cap point in towards your area of interest can do more and I think it's okay to just paint over photos it speeds up your process then maybe let's just add some like right now it's a little happy accident here like I see some red here maybe there's like a cool I can do some sort of a horizon here so I can take that paint some bright orange like that and then maybe use this one here make a new layer plain your Dodge then your Dodge anywhere the where there's lights basically let's say the sun is shining down this valley here then maybe I one of these pretty cool and there we go I hope that you learn something at least about clouds in this tutorial other than all the lighting and landscape stuff that I kept you know busying myself with but yeah I mean it's just about practicing it and you'll get a hang of it pretty quickly and you can use photos as well just to paint just to practice painting and make your really make your paintings look more realistic and one more thing like when when it comes to painting smoke and stuff then the clouds can I get more you know detailed then you can use more more stuff like let's say we want to have a house right here which has smoke rising above it so let's just use just if we do some whoops have linear dodge appear man is a huge house I love Photoshop you'd never do that with painting on canvas you know just something quick you know when they have some fireplace in here and it's shining up and let's say they have a chimney here like if you want to do some smoke there you'd need to make make the smoke live kanima or you know details so if we could use something like this one right here this is actually just for smoke could use a bit darker value not brown and it's more detailed and thicker so you don't have the softer softer thing going and as it goes as it rises smoke it gets more dispersed so you could start making it a bit more soft like that bit more spaced as well and then you can start adding more soft things up here maybe the mix the sky but down here is very thick and detailed so yeah I think this concludes the tutorial and if you have any questions suggestions or any feedback I'd love to hear them and be sure to subscribe to the evident design newsletter - to learn more about the new course that I'm doing in in concept art where I'll be talking about how to actually start making money as a concept artist how to start learning you know how to do professional concept art get getting all the fundamentals in in Photoshop and also fundamentals and paintings and tons of tips and tricks and stuff so stay tuned for that and I'll see you on the next video bye bye guys

Channel: Walid Feghali

Views: 188,606

Keywords: painting tutorial, digital painting, concept art, tutorial, clouds, atmosphere, landscape, environment art, techniques, technique, matte painting

Id: oVrsmD-EdOA

Length: 41min 47sec (2507 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2016