I found a site with some tutorials for making country backgrounds. I never knew you could make changes to the type of layer you were adding to your project.
After flood filling my square with the color of my choice, I clicked other for my foreground color, and slid the slider bar which shows up when you change the lightness of your color to a lighter shade.
In the blue instance, I started with #5a769c and slid the lightness bar to the right and came up with #dae1ea.
I then flood filled my background on a new layer using the Blend Mode>>Dissolve and Opacity>>2.
All other settings are the default.
This is what I came up with.
And here's the link to the tutorial.
Sheryl