Lightning Backgrounds: 10 Blue-Violet Storm Skies, 4 Bolt Patterns and 2 Transparent Overlays

These lightning backgrounds share one storm palette: deep blue at the top of the sky, peach light low on the horizon, and clouds edged in violet. Ten of the 16 designs are full scenes. The other six are made to be layered or repeated, four patterns and two bolts on clear backgrounds.

Ten storms, four kinds of ground

The sky barely changes from scene to scene. What changes is where the bolt lands and what sits under it.

• Mountains. In Blue-Hour Ridge a bolt drops on the right onto a misty ridge. Blue-Hour Ranges has the lightning running sideways across the sky above fog-filled valleys. Lilac Tempest has a stronger purple cast, with a thick bolt coming out of the clouds at top left. In Periwinkle Arc a long bolt climbs from the left-hand clouds to the top right corner, over a valley with a river of mist.
• Sea. Lavender Sea sends its bolt straight down into the water, and the light runs toward you as a bright streak on the waves. Sapphire Strike puts the bolt beside a rocky coast with small islands and the sun just touching the horizon. Violet Cloud Ocean is the quiet one: a calm sea and only a faint bolt high in the clouds.
• Open country. Silver Cloud Window shows thin bolts in a gap between two cloud banks, with flat land and small lakes far below.
• Cities. Luminous City has a low skyline of lit windows behind dark trees, and Lilac City has a waterfront skyline reflected in still water. Both cities are invented.

All ten scenes were made with AI at 1254 x 1254 pixels and then enlarged. The 3600-pixel square is bigger than the original, but it holds no extra fine detail.

The wide versions show less ground

The 3840 x 2160 and 1920 x 1080 files have the same framing, and both are 16:9 crops taken from the square. START-HERE.txt says the crops were set to keep the lightning or the city in frame. In four scenes that leaves almost nothing but sky. The wide Silver Cloud Window, Blue-Hour Ranges, Violet Cloud Ocean and Periwinkle Arc lose their mountains or sea. If you want the land in the picture, use the square file. All of these are still images for a desktop or a video layout. None of them move.

Patterns and overlays

Blue Branch Repeat and Violet Branch Repeat are soft color gradients crossed by thin, pale lightning branches, quiet enough to sit behind text. Golden Bolt Pattern scatters small flat bolt icons in lavender, blue and gold over very pale lilac. Ice Bolt Pattern uses blue, lilac and icy pale blue over pale blue. Each pattern comes as a square JPG and as a PNG tile that repeats at 100% with no gap or visible join.

The two overlays are a vertical Forked Strike and Sheet Lightning, a long crack that runs across the frame and splits into branches. Each one is a white core with a faint blue glow, and everything around it is transparent. START-HERE.txt describes the method: put the bolt on its own layer above your picture, keep the blend mode on Normal, and lower the opacity until it sits right. Dark pictures show the glow best. The patterns and overlays were drawn by code at full size, so they were not enlarged.

Printing the PDFs

The PDFs hold designs 1 to 14 only. The overlays have no print pages. Each page centers one square with white margins around it: 8 inches across on US Letter, just under 7.8 inches on A4. That is smaller than a 12-inch print, so for that size print the square JPG instead. Print at Actual Size, and run a small test first, since the darker storm skies use a lot of ink.