This piece of artwork is from a promo-poster I created for a Semi-annual dodgeball tournament I am helping organize. I hid the informational text for the purpose of displaying the actual art.
I have a running joke with a friend that the worst looking thing in all of Photoshop is ‘Render Clouds.’
(And we have a sub-joke that the best looking thing, according to Blizzard and World of Warcraft, is the Craquelure filter.)
I like to think of render Clouds as Photoshop’s ‘random number generator.’ It should almost never directly be used to add a noise pattern to a texture. However, with the right Level/Curves adjustments, it can produce some very nice random, organic effects.
The fire coming off the dodgeball in this piece of art is actually three layers of ‘Render Clouds’ set to Linear Dodge (Add), with different Hue adjustments set to ‘Colorize.’ I used a combination of Liquefy followed by Transform>Warp to get the flame shape I desired.
You’ll see there’s some flagrant ‘Render Clouds’ going on in the background. In the final printed piece this is broken up by text, so the ‘Clouds’ give the impression of depth as in a hazy night sky. Given that this piece was being created pro-bono under a pretty stiff deadline, the vile ‘render clouds’ served their purpose well.
