How to Paint Digital Landscapes

Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by DAS Team in Articles

In this tutorial I will try to explain how a digital landscape can be made. I will talk about some great workflow tips when dealing with details and larger paintings. Also some tips on how to check your paintings for mistakes and a way of getting the composition right.

The sketch and composition

Sketching is fun to do. Wether you sketch on paper or digital, the progress is so fast and you get really fast results. I like to sketch digital because of the possiblities of quick erasing, moving, skewing and distoring. For this painting I wanted a distorted feeling. A small curving path in the middle to guide the eye through the features in the painting.

For this sketch I didn’t want to get lost in the perspective rules, so I just started sketching with a small default round brush and switched constantly between the eraser tool and the painting brush by pressing respectivly the E and B on the keyboard. I gave the background a little bit of colour so I wouldn’t stare at a blank canvas. Don’t be scared to make mistakes at this stage. Mistakes often lead to deviations of your first idea and at some point you’ll end up with a more original concept. If something doesn’t work out, it’s easy to erase it.

The path in the middle has no real ending, it will hide in a thick morning fog, so I kept that part very loose. The rocks in front finishes the composition. Following the trail in the middle, you see the different layers in the composition. The foreground is the bar with the toilet and the massive tree. Behind that there is a puddle with a bird waiting for a quick snack, surrounded by some waterplants and a bridge. Behind that, you can find the waterwell and the house. The background will have some trees and a fog to hide the end of the path. The composition as it’s displayed here is considered finished, but it’s just the sketch so many things could happen before the final result.

Color sketching

A great way of getting resources for colours is browsing the net for photos. There are plenty of free stocksites who have nice colourschemed photos of woods and trees. It’s a good habit to sketch when you travel, or take photo’s for your own personal inspiration. I based myself on my imagination on this project without getting resources first.

I soften the sketch layer by lowering it’s opacity, so I won’t get to distracted by the lines. When the coloursketch is finished (when the colours feel good), the linesketch can be erased. With a large brush I started to block in the background forest. The background colour I used as my first base for the sketch is now used as the fogged air behind the trees. As you can see, I painted the corners a bit darker. This has two reasons: First of all, the dark part is more inwoods, so the sun has more troubles getting through. Secondly, I used a photographers trick called ‘vignetting’. It’s actualy a way of darkening the corners to get that finished framed look. It was commingly used by traditional cameras, but some digital photographers still use the effect in Photoshop.

More colours added on the canvas. As you see I try to paint in spirals. The eye is automaticly attracted to the heavy side of the painting. Then it follows the house, the well, the bar and eventuatly it will follow the path towards the end.

Here are the finished color sketches. The shadows on the rocks are a bit shown. Some leaves are touched on the wall, a bucket in the well and some parts of the house. Don’t bother doing details at this stage, because the colours can change a lot and detailed work could get lost really quick. Therefore it’s best to keep it very basic. This is detailed enough to go through with it.

Check your composition

One thing you should do more often is to check if there are any mistakes in the design. When you are painting and sketching: changing, adding and removing stuff in your canvas can change your original ideas and composition. Your eyes can desieve you when you look at it for a long time. Therefore you can go for a walk and come back with a fresh view. If there are mistakes, you will then be able to see them directly. Asking the advice of a fellow painter is a good way of getting a objective critique on the design. Another way is to flip the canvas. You will be surprised how different the composition is. Mistakes are very often found on this way. I created a shortcut for flipping the canvas. You can do that by going to ‘Edit – Keyboard Shortcuts’. Under The ‘Keyboard Shortcuts-tab’ you should open up ‘Edit’ and browse until you find ‘Flip horiontal’. Once clicked, you can enter your desired shortkey. Mine is set to Ctrl+² – I think that’s an easy one to remember and it feels comfortable under your fingers.

Detailing in Photoshop

Detailing is definatly the most fun step in digital painting. In all previous steps, you need to make sure all things are correct, matching together, have great colourblends, … When you are able to start detailing, that means all those thinking steps are over. The only thing you need to do now is just fill in the gaps you left. Photoshop has a great feature to get to the details without losing the view whole painting. That way you won’t do radical changes that much while detailing. Having a second screen would be a great help if you do smaller details. But this technique is also useable if you have only one screen available. I did this by going to ‘Window – Arrange – New window for ‘your document.psd’. A new box will appear with the same painting. On one of the windows, I keep zoomed out to see the whole painting, and on the other projectwindow I zoom in to paint the details. Whenever I detail, I keep an eye open on the whole project to see if everything still fits. You can tile them horizontally or vertically or just place them wherever you want them to.

I mostly tile them horizontally using the first frame as a reference of the whole picture. I just zoom out so much (Ctrl+-) until I see the whole picture, or at least the part I’ll be working on at that moment. You can work on both frames if you need to do something quickly on a bigger scale, or you need to change something very small. The window that’s currently active and ready to be altered is highlited. In my case, it’s the lowest window that contained the bigger view. The lowest part is the window I’ll be working on. See how I add more detail to the trees and add a little horse on the canvas. The things I change on this frame are automaticly altered in the other frame. This is similar to the Navigation palette. While painting with this technique, you can modify the size very quickly.

Background detailing

Trees are fun to paint because they doesn’t need much to get recognized and it leaves a lot to our imagination. The road is the entry to the village for the horse and the rider, so I started painting that first. Painting from back to front is a technique I use often. It’s recommended to work on the whole painting as a whole, but detailing is something you must do part by part. In my opinion that’s the best and fastest way.

I started detailing the trees in the background. The light tones were already placed on the canvas, I just needed to clean them. Painting the trunks, branches and a few leafs towards the house and the waterwell led to the detailing of the path in the middle. While I was painting some bigger parts on the trees, I accidentaly marked that place leaving a weird looking spot. Few minutes later, there was a horse driving towards the village. While painting the horse, I figured that more people were needed in the picture to make it more lively, so I was thinking of an older woman getting some water in the well. I didn’t want any people in front of the painting, or it would lose it’s calmness. The horse throws a very slightly shadow. Those details are very often forgotten.

I found out the sketch of the house needed improvement, before I started rendering. I also added a little portal roof to be safe for the rain when you have to wait for somebody to open the door. Notice that I didn’t use any black in the house. Even the darkest parts are just a brown which looks darker next to lighter paint. I added some hay in front of the house, I didn’t like the empty place.

Painting architecture is really nice if you know a bit about Photoshop. There are so many tricks to paint by repeating things. The bridge over the pool is detailed with some small Photoshop tricks:

I painted the wood in 3 Horizontal lines on a different layer. I even added a little bit of shadow. You can detail it on this stage, but paint it much bigger then the original bridge will be. You can paint one of the columns that supports the handrail as well.

Click with a right mouseclick on the bridge and chose ‘Free Transform’. Handlers will appear around the bridge. If you right-click again, you can chose ‘Warp’. You can try to warp it by hand, but there are different types of warps. The warps used for the bridge can be Arch (which i prefer). In the upper left corner of your Photoshop work field, you can apply the Archwarp on your bridge. It will automatically jump to a bend 50, which will probably be to high. You can either change it by decreasing the number or by dragging the handler down. Now add the columns on the same distance from each other.

The bridge needs to be distorted to match the perspective. You can do that by right-clicking again and choosing ‘Free Transform – Distortion’. Drag the handlers in place and your bridge is finished. Try sharpen the edges a bit, resize, sharpen again, and place it. Add some more details like shadow and creases. Change a few columns so it isn’t too repetetive.

The waterwell is detailed. You can see the old woman trying to get the bucket. The hardest part about the well was the size. If I compared the house with the well and the path in the middle, the well would be way to big for the house. I needed to find a way of bringing the well much more forward than the house. That’s why I added the descending ground. This will improve the perspective.

On the second image you see more grass added on front of the well. Also a little offpath to the well. It looks like a lot of people have crossed that path. It makes the scenery a bit more used and gives it a history. I also gave the trees behind and in front of the well some attention. The background is quite detailed now.

Foreground detailing

I won’t overload you with large amounts of text on this step. The details needed on this part is not too hard. It’s just a matter of filling up the gaps as nicely as possible. What I do want to mention is the path in the middle. With a small brush, I drew the outlines of the road. Here you can see how its descending. When you go for a walk in the woods, you see that often-used paths are always deeper then the unwalked parts.

I extended the details on the trees. I didn’t want them to be as dark as before because it divided the composition to much. The large tree in front has been painted as well.

The cabinet on the lower right has been redrawn to match the perspective. To have the real woodtexture on there I painted the background colors in different browns. Then I took a smaller darker opacity brush and followed the woodlines. I also added some lighter stripes as well.

Finishing

I’ve been asked a lot of time how I get my work so detailed. I keep on telling the same thing. When you think your work is done, give it another hour of work! You’ll be amazed with how much more you can get from a few more minutes of work.