Design an Awesome Watercolour Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show the steps I took to create this really cool, watercolour style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop. I was experimenting the new brushsets and textures I downloaded today and thought I could combine them together and see what result they can bring .

Along the way, we will be using a lot of photo manipulation techniques such as masking, filter effects, layer blending options, and custom brushsets.

This is an intermediate tutorial and some steps can be a bit tricky, but why not have a try!

Here is a preview of the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Dirt Brushsets

Cloud Brushsets

Cloud Texture 1

City

Stroke Brushsets

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 700px with White Background. Create a new layer on top of the background layer called “background texture”, and load the Dirt Brushsets into Photoshop, choose a mixture of those brushes and paint over this newly-created layer:

Make sure to set the brush flow and opacity to around 30-40% and colour to be Black, since we only want a light cover of the dirt texture as a background:

Create a new layer called “cloud 1”, paint some cloud over this layer using the Cloud Brushset we downloaded, in the position as shown below: (apply a slightly darker brush comparing with the previous step)

Step 2

Load the “Cloud Texture 1” image into Photoshop. Copy and paste the entire image onto our document and name this layer as “Cloud Texture 1”:

Apply the following layer mask onto this “cloud texture 1” layer:

and you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this cloud texture layer twice as shown below:

Change the blending mode of the “Cloud Texture 1 copy 2” layer to “Soft Light“, and you will have the following effect:

Add a new Curves Adjustment layer on top of all previous layer with the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Load the City image into Photoshop, copy and paste the whole image onto our document and name the new layer “city”, position it as shown below:

Add a layer mask to this layer, on the mask, erase the outer portion of the city image by using a soft, round brush, mixing with the cloud brush we just download for edge effects:

Here is what I have after the erasing:

I decided to alter the Hue and Saturation of the city layer a bit, so I added a new Hue and Saturation adjustment layer with the following settings: (be sure to tick “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option when adding the adjustment layer)

and here is the effect so far:

Step 4

Duplicate the “city” layer once and drag the duplicated layer to the top, change its blending mode to “Screen”, you will have the following effect:

Then I add a new Black and White adjustment layer with the following settings:

change the blending mode of this black and white adjustment layer to “Multiply”, and you will have the following effect:

Step 5

Duplicate the “city” layer three times, apply the following layer blending option to each duplicated layer:

On the “City copy 2” layer, go to Filter > Artistic > Watercolor and apply the following settings:

On the “City copy 4” layer, change the layer blending mode to “soft light”, and apply the following layer mask (use the Stroke Brushsets to paint the edges)

You will see now we have the right side of the image highlighted, therefore adding more depth to the image:

Step 6

To add more cloud effect on the bottom part of image, we can duplicate the “Cloud texture” layer twice and drag both duplicated layer to the top, change their layer blending mode “overlay”, and you will have the following effect:

To add some more watercolour effect onto the effect, we can simply create a new layer (set blending mode to “overlay”), and grab the “Stroke Brush” we downloaded, paint over the new layer with a light grey colour:

Step 7

For final adjustments, I added some floral brush painting and a new Color Balance layer with the following settings:

And add the following mask to this colour balance adjustment layer:

and here is the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it! Drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!