: Creating this merged colour background in Photoshop or Illustrator I'm fairly new to designing and was just wondering whether if anybody knows how to go about creating the background in the image

@Nimeshi706

Manly's answer gives a good overview of creating the background in Photoshop. Another option if you can use Illustrator is to use a gradient mesh, which give you a lot more control over your gradients.


Illustrator Help / Meshes
Illustrator Tutorial / Learn the Gradient Mesh tool





Draw a rectangle and fill it with your base color.
Use the Gradient Mesh Tool (U) to start adding mesh points. Simply click anywhere on the rectangle to add points. Change the color of each individual point to color your mesh:





Adjust the positioning of your mesh points to create the shape you want.





Keep building up your mesh points to add further details.




I then took this back in to Photoshop, added some some dunes which I colored with a gradient map and some stars etc...

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@Martha945

That background is hand painted, using the Paint Brush tool.

A simpler method would be to use a three-color gradient, as I have below:



For a more personal touch, paint the sky in by hand. I have given a very quick example below, naming each layer with the hex value of the color I used. I used a large, 0% hardness brush. Add the stars in by using a small, hard brush and varying the size, either with [ or ] or by altering your brush presets to scatter and vary size automatically (my preferred method).

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