How to Make Realistic-looking Clouds (or Smoke) in PSP8 - Page 2

The end result

Finally, play around with the texture settings (scale and angle etc.) to come up with different variations. Also, remember how I said at the beginning that the background colour is important, even though we fill the image up over it with the cloud texture? The texture fill is transparent, soooo, what that means is if you play around with the original background colour, you will have different degrees of dark and light beneath the clouds/smoke. That's also why it's always best to place the cloud/smoke fill on its own layer, then you can go back to the background layer and play around with the colour there if you're not happy with how the cloud/smoke looks. Here's a couple of examples below:

The original fill, with the white background

The original fill, with a black background. Quite a difference, huh?

Below is the original image of the plane on the first page at 100%. To get this effect, I created the cloud background (with a lighter shade of blue), created a new layer and placed an old tube I had of the plane on it. (This is an 'elderly' tube - I think it dates back to PSP5!). I then created a new layer on top of that, and with the airbrush tool I carefully sprayed a little white on top of the plane using the chalk brush to give it a cloudy look (found on the custom brushes menu), as if the plane is coming out from behind the clouds.

I think the main thing to remember here is that there are lots of variations to be played with. Have fun and create something wonderful :-)