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New Canvas

Open Photoshop and create a new canvas in RGB color, with a white background. Depending on how you want to display your finished art, the size of your canvas will vary. If you want to be able to print the finished sunset silhouette, work at a very large size - use the "inches" instead of pixels to determine what you're working at. Since mine is going to be here on a web page, I'm just working with a 400 x 400 pixel canvas.

Color Palette

Create another new canvas, about 200 x 200 pixels in size. This one is just for your color palette. For the purposes of this tutorial, you can just use mine, below. The goal is to have about 5 colors (plus black) maximum that are closely related and represent the colors of the sunset in your imagination.

Map the Horizon

Now, fill your background with the basic color of the sky from the color palette you're using. I'm using the top left color, the burnt orange. Then, grab your rectangle tool and use black to create what will become water on the lower third of your canvas.

Note: Any time that a shape is created in this tutorial, you need to right-click its layer and choose "Rasterize" once you have created it.

Let the Sun Shine

Now, grab your elliptical shape tool and use the brightest of your colors in your palette to create the sun. You will want this layer to be right behind your "water" layer. The sun should be quite large, the backdrop for your silhouette.

Some Clouds for Effect

There's hundreds of ways to make clouds, but we want to create a beautiful piece of artwork that doesn't take a lot of time. So, grab this brush set and you'll have plenty of clouds to work with.

Create a new layer and paint a few (seriously, don't go overboard) clouds on the new layer.

In my example, I'm using the darkest orange color. I used 2 brushes from the set above, trying to move in a horizontal line to echo the horizon. This layer needs to be on the upper portion of your image, not near the horizon itself.

Horizon Clouds

Within the brush set is a cloud line. It will run right above the horizon. In my example, I'm using the reddish color.

Locate the horizontal brush, and paint a line across the horizon on a new layer.

Water

You can go about this step one of two ways. Either you can follow steps 1-3 of the Abstract Chrome Sig Tutorial located here, or you can grab this example image and resize it to fit your water area:

Either way that you go, you should end up with a sort of rippling surface for your water. Lower the "fill" of this surface to about 30% and you should have something like this:

Blur the Horizon

Only a couple steps left! Looking nice, isn't it? And how easy has it been - it's not about to get harder.

Now, we want to blur the horizon clouds into the surface of the water a bit. To do this, grab your rectangle shape tool and draw a line behind the red clouds but above the water that is the same red color as those clouds.

With that shape selected, click "Filter" and choose "Blur". From the options, click "Gaussian Blur" and enter 7 pixels for the amount of blur.

Add a Silhouette

What's left? Just our silhouette! There are a lot of silhouette shapes available online, but the one I'm using here comes from the "Study of a Woman" Photoshop Shape Pack available on our site.

Use black and hold your shift key down when you draw your silhouette shape - this will keep all the proportions accurate. Rasterize the finished shape and you're ready to save your beautiful piece of art.