Blogternals

Cartoon Clouds are so easy in GIMP that I almost shouldn’t be writing this article, but maybe it will be useful for somebody. The basic idea here is we are going to be trying to create a cool looking puffy cloud (For those technical among us Nimbus Clouds). The concept here is going to be K.I.S.S. as most cartoon artist try and keep there drawings simple so shall we in this tutorial. Well strap yourself in cause here we go.

You will need to create a new canvas for your cloud, here are the settings that I used.

Alright, now I guess we need a sky to put our cloud in so let’s grab our gradient tool and use the following colors #23B7FF and #8FE1f2 and create a gradient “sky” something like this.

To create the could we are actually going to be just selecting a region as the outline for the cloud. Create a new layer to put the cloud on and the use the circle/ellipse tool and, the following settings, just click around until you have a shape that you are happy with. Below is what I wound up with.

On this new layer we need to fill in the selected area, so get out your bucket fill tool and fill the selection up with a cloud color, I chose #FDFDFD.

Now that we have the base for our cloud lets give it some depth. What I do here is simple but effective. Create a new layer making sure you leave the cloud selected. Grab the spray brush tool and set the foreground color to #838383. Now using the below settings kinda spray a little gray on the bottoms of the clouds.

Next we drop a shadow using the drop shadow tool with the following settings.

I know this looks pretty convincing but lets not stop here lets finish this off. Select the layer with gray shadows because we need to do two things here. One, we need to smear the shadows so they look more realistic and two, we need to adjust the opacity so they blend well with the shadows. Use your best judgment here on what looks best but just don’t over do it. By the way the reason we do this now instead of before we drop the shadow is so we can get the proper blend with the shadow.

And there you have it the best looking cartoon clouds I ever made, even if I do say so myself.

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!