Getting started

The first thing you need, quite obviously, are source-pics to work with. I had the luck of finding two great ones to use: this and this.

Don't forget to check the usage restrictions on every pic you use. The pic of the girl has a lot of them, can't be used outside deviantart without permission, can't be chopped in certain ways and since it is a child worth demands me to ask for permission to use it even if it was free.

Anyway. I opened them both in photoshop, rotated, mirrored and cropped the sky picture and there after placed the girl in a position I thought would fit nicely.
Then I set the opacity of the girl to 100% and hid it, we will need it later.

Layers
I am a very organized person when working with photoshop, and I use a lot of layer-groups. So the first thing we are gonna do is to create groups to organize our work.

The lower group is where we are gonna do the changes to the clouds later on. The upper group contains a picture of the girl, which I have desaturated, blurred and then set the blend mode to "screen". This will make the brighter parts of the girl shine through, which will make a great guideline and also enhance the cloud's form. I did some rough masking:

At this point we don't need it to be any better, but later on we will refine it.


In liquify we believe
Now it is time to alter the clouds. The most important thing. To my help I have the liquify-filter, which is directly under the filter-menu. Mastering this filter will open so many doors. Nowadays I use liquify in nearly everything I do. I copied the original layer and opened it in liquify.
To alter the image I used the forward warp tool (1). The crucial thing here is the settings (2). Play with them and learn what they do!

Before I opened liquify I unhid the top layer of the girl so With backdrop (3) checked it will now show the girl-layer, you don't see it on the picture here because the opacity of the backdrop is 0. Changing the opacity up and down will make it visible and give you a guideline to how to change the cloud.

When I was happy with the result (which I was in the above picture) I closed liquify and masked the liquify layer so the transition was smooth. The piece in the above picture is just the bottom left of the dress, so I continued by creating a new layer above it and pressed ctrl+shift+e to copy everything visible. Then I used liquify to make the parts just above the bottom left of the dresses. I continued working like this with layer after layer until I had made most of the girl. Now and then I also cloned in blue areas where I didn't want any clouds. The progress looked like this.

As you might notice, I don't have any head and some parts don't really look good. This is because during all these changes I have had a look at my screen-layer, which you will read about in the next page...

Screen
Yes. The screen layers only shows the brightest parts of the images. Since clouds have a very bright color, the screen layers blend very well with it. During the whole process described in the page before I now and then looked at the screen layer and masked it to enhance the clouds, or even be a new part of it. The result is this:

Some parts of the girl where darker than others, so actually I divided the screen layers in three, one for the dress, one for the torso and on for the head. All with different brightness/contrast to give a good balance of white.


Finishing touches
That's the basic technique and for a while I thought picture was finished here, but after leaving the computer for an hour and coming back I realised that the clouds around the girl could be made much more effectful. Using the same technique as for making the girl, liquifying and cloning, I made much more vivid clouds that were more integrated with the girl.

But still I was not happy. It looked to boring. As a final touch I used a white brush and the smudge tool to paint some clouds. Those clouds were way too white so I created a layer above which I filled with a color I sampled from the clouds and pressed ctrl+alt+g to link it to the handbrushed clouds. I also did some changes to the screen layer which contains the head. Using the smudge tool I made the hair "flow" more. And ta-da, we have the finished picture: