Trees! Mountains! Peril!
High time for another update.
I struggled with trees and mountains for the last week. Let me show you what I came up with.
First, trees. We all love em and hate em, right?
I started by making custom brushes and had the old transparency problem. You know, where the one brush shows through the other when they overlap? Hated that. I read all (well, many) of the very helpful tutorials, but found nothing to my satisfaction.
In the end I made up a custom brush that was just a black, filled shape of a tree. Then I activated the color dynamics in the tool menu and tried that. That way the shapes don’t show through and have a variety in color aswell. You have to be careful to draw from top to bottom though.
Though that wasn’t what I originally looked for, I quite like it. Plus if you don’t want it in black and white, you can just change the fore-/background colors and have a nice green forest.
Would that be worth a short tutorial? I haven’t seen my solution anywhere, but I don’t want to spam the forum with ANOTHER forest tut…
Looks like this:
Which brings us to number two: Mountains. We all love em and hate em, right?
I encountered the same problems as with the trees, read many a tutorial, but again found nothing to my satisfaction (no offense to the great tutorials out there, great jobs from the authors).
The clone stamp solution isn’t to my liking, so I just hand-drew the mountains from scratch.
I know they probably don’t match the scale yet and have a few problems with perspective, but I’m learning Photoshop AND drawing/painting from scratch at the same time here. Considering that I’m already quite pleased.
The mountains basically have three layers: one is just a slight grey background, the second is the details and the third for snow.
I drew the outlines first, using a thin, hard pen tool, and then, after putting in the details and the snow, hid that layer. For the finishing touch I used the smudge tool on both the detail and snow layer.
As you can see, I also outlined the coast with a light brush, as in an earlier try.
Gonna move on to rivers and general landshaping (hills and such) next, I’ve had enough of mountains and trees for now!
Would be glad for some feedback on everything!
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