Hey, been practicing on some clouds for my first new pixel project in years. I've never done any clouds, so it's been... enlightening. This is still a study, but I think I'm getting close to the proper technique.

I'm trying to avoid the usual pattern dithering as much as possible, since I think I over-dithered most of my old stuff. I came up with this weird horizontal dithering thing here as a compensation, and it kind of gave it a brushed look that looked kinda cool.

Anyway, here's the current stuff. No references:


(version on the right with a plain bg for clarity and some slight color changes - please, ignore the outlines)

The clouds on the right are in a more "advanced" stage (just some extra turbulence), but I'm not sure if they're better. In fact, the more I look at these the more I hate them. The idea was to have clouds as realistic as possible (in shape, but not really in color), but that's been trickier than I thought.

Here's some old studies. The one at the right has more turbulence, and while it's not very realistic I'm still quite fond of it, except for the shadow at the right:



I still think I'm missing something important here. Can anyone give any tips?

Edited by 1ucas - 25 March 2010 at 2:22pm