I was inspired by this image on Pinterest, but I didn't want to use an IRL image for the background and I knew the sims backdrops were a little ... lackluster so I tried taking multiple screenshots of SanMy and piecing them together to make the city look more dense and lively. And ... it worked! Now I want to do it with all the different worlds! lol
I'm a slut for good Photoshop brushes so here are what I used:
I used these free city brushes for the lights, which are phenomenal!
I used these free moon and star brushes for the moon (really love the glow of this moon in this set, it saves me a lot of time not having to do it myself).
If you like really faint starry skies, I highly recommend these free starry night brushes. So quietly beautiful!
These are some of my favorite free cloud brushes! I've used them for many edits (including this one) and I love that they are already in cloud shapes.
My pro tip from watching many many cloud painting videos. Start with a darker color and layer a light color on top like 5px smaller than your previous brush size (press your [ key in Photoshop to do that quickly). Do that for like 3-4 colors. The darker colors will slowly peak out from behind the brighter clouds giving it that depth that can be hard to paint. That is how I painted this!
