Photoshop Tutorial: Create an Animated Sky Silhouette

Through various websites, including my own, I've been creating Photoshop tutorials for more than four years. In all that time, the most popular tutorial I've ever created - bar none - was one on designing a sunset silhouette piece of artwork. Since that tutorial was released, I've had a number of requests for an animated silhouette tutorial. This is my response: something that I feel is both artistic, and attractively animated.

Following the steps in this tutorial - only ten of them - you will be able to create an animated piece that smoothly transitions from night to day behind a silhouette of your choice. All that you need to create it is Photoshop - any version from 7.0 through current will work fine. ImageReady is also used, but is bundled with all full versions of Photoshop. In other words, it won't work with Elements.

Note that there are two images attached to this article. One image is the finished animation, an example of what can be created with these steps. The other image is this tutorial in .gif format with illustrations - but you will find that following along here will be more beneficial. All text has to be kept brief in the image version of this tutorial because I don't want it to take an hour to download on your screen.

The Steps

One: Open a new canvas in Photoshop (File, New). This canvas should be sized 350 x 150 pixels in RGB mode. Set your foreground color to orange (#db5809) and your background to yellow (#fae608).

Two: Duplicate your background layer (right-click the layer and choose “Duplicate”). Then, hit your layer styles (in your toolbar - Layer, Styles) and choose “Gradient Overlay”. Apply the orange-to-black gradient smoothly from left to right. You might want to adjust the slider so that more yellow or more orange are showing, depending on the look you like best.

Three: Set your foreground color to blue (#1d4e80) and create a new layer (Layer, New, Layer). Fill the new layer using your paintbucket tool with the blue. Then, set your foreground color to white and use star brushes to lightly dot the sky with white stars.