How to Make Realistic-looking Clouds (or Smoke) in PSP8

This tutorial will show you how to make realistic-looking clouds or smoke using the features in the materials palette. (Take your pick, it will look like both!) The new materials palette is so versatile. There's a lot of great effects you can now create with it that you could only accomplish before by using layers in previous versions. Here is the quick and easy way of creating clouds (or smoke) that look real enough you can almost reach out and touch them ;-)

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1.  Open up a new image, 300 x 300 with a white background (see below, left). (The background colour is important, because our sky and cloud fill will be semi-transparent - more on that later).

To change the background colour of your image, right-click on the colour box to change (as at left). This brings up the colour-picker box. Now left-click on white in the colour pop-up to change to the background colour (see below).

2.  Now, this step is optional, because the beauty of this method is that you don't really need to place your fill on a new layer for the effect to work. However, to give yourself more options as to how the final version will look, I do recommend you create a layer here. (I'll explain all at the end :-) To create a new layer for our cloud/smoke fill, go to Layers>New raster layer>OK.

3.  Open the materials palette (if it's not already open). View>Palettes>Materials. Run your mouse over your existing foreground colour, and then right-click and choose Other to bring the big colour picker up (as shown below, left).

4.  Now we need to choose a blue sky colour. Run your mouse and left-click over any one of the darker blue shades on the colour picker (see below right). You'll notice the information in the RGB, HSL, and HTML boxes change, and the Current colour box change to blue. When you've done that, click on the texture box, and choose 'Backdrop' from the drop-down menu (shown bottom, left). I went with the default settings here, Angle=0 and Scale=100.

It doesn't matter what colour blue you go with, as long as it's a darker shade. As you can see I went with one shown at right.

5.  Your materials palette should now look like what I have (below). Notice how the transparency button is now selected. That happens automatically when a texture is selected. Now all we need to do is fill our image with the new foreground, so go to the fill tool (the paintbucket) on the tools menu, select and left-click over your image to fill. Voila, instant blue sky and clouds (see next page . . . .)