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

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

Posted on August 10th, 2009 under Photo Effect

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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)

city on cloud flatten 500x291 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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vip sign up 250 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

1 paint 500x291 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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)

1 paint cloud 500x279 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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″:

2 drag 500x290 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

2 mask 499x283 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

and you will have the following effect:

2 effect 500x279 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

Duplicate this cloud texture layer twice as shown below:

2 layer 2 500x152 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

2 effect 3 500x286 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

2 curve Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

and you will have the following effect:

2 effect 2 500x288 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

3 copy 500x291 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

3 mask 500x291 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

Here is what I have after the erasing:

3 effect 500x288 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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)

3 hue Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

and here is the effect so far:

3 effect 2 500x286 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

4 effect 500x280 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

4 bw Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

4 effect 2 500x283 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

Step 5

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

5 layer 500x163 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

watercolour 500x351 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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)

5 mask 500x284 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

5 effect 500x289 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

6 drag 500x273 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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:

6 effect 500x284 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

Step 7

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

7 col1 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

7 mask 500x290 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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

city on cloud flatten 500x291 Design an Awesome Watercolour Style City on Cloud Artwork in Photoshop

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!

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  • ricardofx

    very beutyfull;;;
    very beatyfull;;;
    nice result congratulations

    rfx.

  • http://www.joyoge.com/ joyoge designers’ bookmark

    looks really nice city, thanks for this artwork tut..

  • http://designm.ag/news/design-an-awesome-watercolour-style-%e2%80%9ccity-on-cloud%e2%80%9d-artwork-in-photoshop/ Design an Awesome Watercolour Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop

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  • http://design-newz.com/2009/08/10/design-an-awesome-watercolour-style-%e2%80%9ccity-on-cloud%e2%80%9d-artwork-in-photoshop/ Design An Awesome Watercolour Style “City On Cloud” Artwork In Photoshop | Design Newz

    [...] Design An Awesome Watercolour Style “City On Cloud” Artwork In Photoshop [...]

  • http://www.jumplynx.com Ben Baker

    That was cool. Hey, check out my photoshop video tutorials and tell me what you think…you can find my site on my signature below…later PSD Vault!

    Ben Baker,
    http://www.Jumplynx.com | The Media Designer’s Resource
    FREE DOWNLOADS, GRAPHICS, AND VIDEO FOR INTERNET MARKETING AND DESIGN. Photoshop Tutorial and Royalty Free Graphics.

  • http://twitter.com/lucast182 Lucas Tadeu

    Nice tutorial. Thanks for sharing ;)

  • http://cssbrigit.com/CNews/entrada/2009081020303624 CSS Brigit | Design an Awesome Watercolour Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop

    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.

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  • James

    Thank you all for your comments! glad that you enjoy it!

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  • http://www.AlbGraphic.com AlbGraphic

    Nice work ! It’s a really interesting idea . :)

  • http://art-to-buy.blogspot.com/ Cam

    Nice site!!!

  • http://10steps.sg Johnson Koh

    Beautiful work!

  • faisal

    nice i like it very good

  • Divyesh Gajjar

    Good job DuDe

  • http://dpxmag.com dpxmag

    Hello, this is the first tutorial I saw on your site and I must say is great.

  • http://designeroff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/photoshop-tutorial-collections/ Photoshop Tutorial Collections « sishimaru

    [...] Design an Awesome Watercolor Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop – Learn to create a floating city with a really cool watercolor look. [...]

  • http://www.pika.me Clay Jackson

    Very cool effect. Thanks for posting.

  • Claudy

    Nice tutorial!!
    Thanks!

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  • http://thergyi72.blogspot.com taryarL

    so so cool Lol :)
    i like all of ur tutorials
    thank u 1000000000 times :)

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    [...] Design an Awesome Watercolor Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop – Learn to create a floating city with a really cool watercolor look. [...]

  • vanessa

    Marvellous!!! I just followed your tutorial and it was amazing! Thanks a ton for the awesome explanation!!! You get 5 thumbs up for each hand!!

  • http://Website sophie

    you dont give a link to the floral brush painting ???

  • James Qu

    @sophie: you can find those brushes on all major brush sites such as brusheezy, qbrush, etc.

  • http://www.clippingimages.com shabnam

    looks really cool, nice!!!!!