A while ago, I did this painting in my endeavor to paint and upload 1 thing every day.
It can seem like an impossibility to come home after 8 straight hours of painting commercially, just to put in 2,3 or 4 more to develop you craft; or to simply get an idea out of your head. Basically, you have to develop stategies to make this happen- shortcuts that allow you to skip a ton of strokes (like they would in this painting) and therefore save a lot of time. Photoshops Tree Filter is one of such shortcuts and it made it possible to paint this piece in little over 40 minutes. No sorcery, I promise! Let's have a look at how this works:
I started with a Background that remotely resembles dawn. Just a gradient, nothing special.
I knew I liked to have a very dark forest scene. I mean, how much light can there be if the sun has made its way over the horizon already? So I used dark grey and blueish tones (to complement the orange background) and just gave the ground some texture. Also, I added some horizontal lines in the sky to make it feel a bit more natural. Now the interesting part: Trees!
The tree filter is pretty self-explanatory. Just play around here and add your first tree.
And the second one. And third.
No 5 minutes into painting, and already half done- looks like a promising shortcut to me!
Still looks shitty though, but lucky bastards that we are, we have a very dark scene, so all we need is the shilouette really.
Yet again, a gradient does the trick. Something to blend trees and ground, 2 colors, keep it simple and repeat:
It's the same image, jJust a few more trees; I didn't even use the filter anymore. The whole scene just has 8 different trees, copy and pasted all over.
Some random brush strokes break the boring impression a gradient gives. I blurred some of them because they felt distracting, others are left sharp, the sell the idea of a natural growing forest. Don't overdo it here; otherwise you will have chaos really quick. Sometimes, the most important thing is knowing when to stop :)
I added a character, some mist (with a soft brush) as well as some unspecific blue lights to suggest a story. Also, I enhanced contrast, as well as the saturation to get a bit more depth.
Here is a quick step by step to wrap it up:
Tell me what you think and let me know if this was helpful to you. Did you know the filter already? Looking forward to your responses! :)
Fantastic post!
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that is amazing, going to give that a try, you have my vote!
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STOPThis is super helpful, well done! I never knew about that option in photoshop.
I really appreciated this trees short-cut and the demonstration of your proficiency throughout this tutorial @der-reiko! :c)
Makes me wonder if there is a plug-in for that for Paint.NET. ^_^
Nicely done!
cool!!
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Oh my gosh, that's awesome! I'll have to try this one day, thanks for the tutorial.
You're getting a 100% upvote for this one and deserve much more :-)
Resteeming for some extra exposure.
I love learning new photoshop tricks. Thanks for sharing! Definitely following for more. ^_^
Mind blowing !
Thanks for sharing my friend !!
Congratulations that is amazing @der-reiko