The Apple Tree on Photoshop

Our next session was Steve was all to do with Speed drawing. This is a process on Photoshop, where you have very little time to create a concept and show it to a team. As I'm quite new to digital drawing, i'd thought that I would have a time with this lesson. Below will be a step by step guide on how I done the drawing in different stages. The image is a copy of an image all ready digitally drawn.

The background.

I thought that I should start this off with just the background. This was simple and easy enough as in the picture we are copying, its a clear blue sky, all I had to do was simply select the paint bucket tool and fill the page on a separate layer. I also wanted the moon back light, so I selected a gradient of just white, turned the opacity down and put that in the corner that I wanted.

The mountains were next.

I decided that I would start from the back and would work my way through. The next part was the mountains. They were pretty simple to do as there were only two colors in there but it gave the illusion as if there was more.

I used the lasso tool to put out the sharp edges of the mountain. Then using the paint brush, I colored in the out line a brighter blue, this makes the image look further away. The next thing that I had to do was to put on the extremely bright blue. This makes it seems as if there is cuts in the mountain and gives off a brilliant effect. This was also done with the lasso tool. 

At this stage I was happy to stop because of how much I liked those mountains, but decided to continue on to the next stage of the painting.

The trees were next.

The next thing to do was to add in the trees. I thought that this was actually quite difficult as the trees had so many different shades of them and the shape that they had was really difficult to replicate.

I first started off with a light green for the tops of the trees. With this color I choose to do the silhouette  and over the top I would paint the different colors. I then proceeded to to paint the brown and dark brown. On the trees at the back I would use a dark blue, so that they looked way more off in the distance. To finish it off, I topped the leaves at the highest point in the trees with a white. This was to show the moons beams shining onto the trees.

The next stage.

There were several bits that I proceeded with next. Firstly I started off with the tree in front. I liked this as it put more emphasis on perspective as if the trees in the background were far away. As the drawing of the tree was drawn in such simple colors, it gave it a very simplistic but graphical effect. My favorite part of this was the creation of the apples. They weren't hard to make but look of such high quality that I even surprised myself.

The other things that I ended up doing to the picture was creating smalls bumps to show the raising of hills in the left corner. I also put in the silhouette for the fence. This was a bit tricky in trying to get the shape right, in this area, I really had to improvise a lot as my fence came out slightly different to the originals.

Addition of the moon.

The next change was small, in this section, I added in the bright reflection of the moon. I did this in a pure white, changing the opacity up and down depending on how far away it was from the original circle. I also ended up covering it with a half circle similar to that of the sky.

In the background I set the opacity down and painted over so it looks as if fog has consumed parts of the landscape.

Adding the two girls.

There were several things that were down here. In this part I added the two girls, some stars and shading on the lamp posts. 

I first started off by doing the stars. These were easy enough to create. All I had to do was get a white color on the paint brush, turn the opacity down to 10% and dot the brush in various places in the sky, some more than others. 

The next part was the lamp posts. again all I did was simply paint pure white into lamp posts to simply capture the moons gaze. It gives it an interesting effect.

Lastly we come to the girls. I had a lot of trouble getting the shape right with theses two. I started off with the one at the back. I used the posts to measure her body correctly and then proceeded to create a silhouette of her. Over this, I shaded in her core colors and over the top, also added in the moons glare.Once this had been done, the rest was pretty simple, adding in her skin tone and such. Now using the completed girls body as a way of measuring, I went through the same progress with the girl in front, except instead of white for the moon beams, I added a little bit of blue into the mixture, to show her T-shirt.

Darkness helping set the mood.

To finish the piece off, I decided to combine all the layers together and set the brightness down, as I mention above, it helps set the mood of a misty dark night.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with myself. I can already tell, after being on this course for only a couple of weeks that my drawing is improving dramatically and as long as I keep going, I should be at a decent level eventually. I'm also starting to really enjoy digital painting now and would love to generate a decent piece of work.