PROCESS VIDEO // mountain trail - part 3

Here's part 3 of my process for my mountain trail painting! Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.

Here’s some information about this process video: 

• It has been sped up by 200%, so 2 times the original speed. 

• This painting session took me a bit over 7 hours, split up into multiple sessions.

• I edited the process into three parts. This is part two of three!

• I mostly used the hard round brush from my own brush set to paint this. I also used a lot of brush & smudge combinations to paint and then soften edges. The smudge tool I used the most was the scrappy smudge brush from Yuming Li’s brush collection.

• This is painted in Adobe Photoshop. You can replicate a similar workflow inProcreate, with the exception of the gradient tool and the number of layers used! 

Here are some helpful resources that can help understand this process in more detail: 

• Environment essentials: this tutorial breaks down my process for drawing environments into the most basic and essential steps, and especially talks about how I layer my detail from front to back - similarly to what I did in this painting process!

• Drawing environments in Procreate: if you’re curious about how you could translate a process like this one into Procreate, this is a great video to check out! 

SILHOUETTE

This is the stage where I struggle the most with getting the character right. I want a clearly readable silhouette, but I also need to add some details to blend it into the image - a flat silhouette doesn’t do the trick. I’m not really sure where to begin, so at 42 seconds in, I copy/paste a character from another drawing and try modifying that silhouette. I feel like it works to some extent, but I’m never fully satisfied with it, so I spend a lot of time trying different things and tweaking/adjusting it throughout the process. The most challenging thing is dealing with zoom: when I’m zoomed in, it looks fine, but zoomed out it just doesn’t work. For me, this is just a question of trial and error until I can live with the result!

FINAL TOUCHES

In the last stages of the painting, I think about that final pass of detail that can make the image feel more alive. I add some sparkles around the character to give a sense of it being a magical quest, which I do about 57 minutes in. I also push the detail in the foreground areas, by adding more texture to the path and the grass closest to us. I also add some white flowers and other fine detail in this area. I really try to focus this more complex detail in the areas that need it most, so that your eye is drawn to the right areas of the painting!

I hope you like it, and as always, feel free to ask any questions you may have! ✨