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Home»Photo Effect»Design an Awesome Watercolour Style “City on Cloud” Artwork in Photoshop
Photo Effect

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

By James QuAugust 10, 20095 Mins Read
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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

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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)

1 paint cloud

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

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

2 mask

and you will have the following effect:

2 effect

Duplicate this cloud texture layer twice as shown below:

2 layer 2

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

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

2 curve

and you will have the following effect:

2 effect 2

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

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

Here is what I have after the erasing:

3 effect

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

and here is the effect so far:

3 effect 2

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

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

4 bw

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

4 effect 2

Step 5

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

5 layer

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

watercolour

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

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

5 effect

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

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

Step 7

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

7 col

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

7 mask

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

city-on-cloud-flatten

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!

city cloud effect layer photo texture watercolour
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James Qu
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James is a seasoned Photoshop expert with over 25 years of experience, mastering the software since its 5.0 version. As the driving force behind PSD Vault, he authors the majority of its in-depth tutorials and insightful articles.

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19 Comments

  1. ricardofx on August 10, 2009 1:26 PM

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

    rfx.

  2. joyoge designers' bookmark on August 11, 2009 12:37 AM

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

  3. Ben Baker on August 11, 2009 10:16 AM

    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.

  4. Lucas Tadeu on August 11, 2009 10:52 AM

    Nice tutorial. Thanks for sharing ;)

  5. James on August 11, 2009 9:45 PM

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

  6. AlbGraphic on August 14, 2009 9:25 AM

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

  7. Cam on August 14, 2009 7:05 PM

    Nice site!!!

  8. Johnson Koh on August 15, 2009 4:33 PM

    Beautiful work!

  9. faisal on August 15, 2009 6:34 PM

    nice i like it very good

  10. Divyesh Gajjar on August 22, 2009 3:37 AM

    Good job DuDe

  11. dpxmag on August 25, 2009 4:25 AM

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

  12. Clay Jackson on August 31, 2009 8:42 PM

    Very cool effect. Thanks for posting.

  13. Claudy on September 1, 2009 1:20 AM

    Nice tutorial!!
    Thanks!

  14. taryarL on September 30, 2009 6:43 AM

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

  15. vanessa on March 24, 2010 11:03 AM

    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!!

  16. sophie on April 6, 2011 5:46 AM

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

  17. James Qu on April 6, 2011 7:34 PM

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

  18. shabnam on June 14, 2011 4:01 PM

    looks really cool, nice!!!!!

  19. Nyoko Nozomi on July 15, 2017 4:34 PM

    lOVE IT jAMES !

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