I made some cloud concept paintings.

I was messing around with some brush settings in Photoshop yesterday and made a scatter brush that’s good for drawing some quick clouds with my tablet. After awhile a cloud popped out that looked like a serpent and I fleshed it out a bit more.

I like this way of working, it comes a bit more naturally because it’s playful. Back in High School I used to doodle stuff and then decide what it would be after the initial doodle. I still do that in my sketch pads and stuff because it helps me think. What better thing to let your imagination run wild than clouds? When I’m concepting stuff, I usually start with very light colors. It’s easy to overlook this detail, but if you start with a really low-contrast pair of colors you’ll be able to focus more on the general shape and structure of what your drawing as opposed to how ghastly your line quality looks. I put the same image above on a black background to show more of what the actual strokes would look like if that was the case:

In some ways it’s kinda neat, but had I started with this setup [white & light cyan on black] it would have been much harder for me to focus on the general forms I needed to. It’s the same reason that art instructors teach their students to work from general to specific, start with a hard pencil or vine charcoal and gradually build up on top of a well-worked structure.

Download the Photoshop Brush
Make sure to set your foreground and background colors to two colors that are close in brightness. One a little darker than the other. Also, you’ll need to use a tablet to get the proper effect.