Scenery background - Recreational Park

This is actually an artwork done in November 2010. It is based on a really nice recreational park, Taman Rakyat, Klang, Selangor, Malaysia. It was created as a background for an animation that I am working on. It takes 4 days to complete, done with Wacom in Photoshop.


The process are quite the same as my previous work, Inside a forest (I know its a lame name but who cares. haha..)

 I start with a simple sketch, and then I draw using Negative space technique, closely follows the reference photograph. Note that I do not trace the photograph at all.

 Then I paint the rock shape on the rock wall using basic paint bucket tool. Next I create a new layer on top of the rock layer and add a texture using brush tool. I then set the layer to clipping mask. Walla, the rock is now textured. Next I paint the dry leaves using plain brown. For the ground just side of the leaves, I use
plain brownish color and stroke a slightly dark brown horizantal lines over and over to simulate ground texture.

I enhance the rock wall with green random strokes and dark shadow to simulate dirtiness. For the bushes at the top of the rock wall, I paint a plain green for the base color.

I add a yellowish green on some leaves to simulate depth and the sun shines. I copied the line art layer on top of the color layer to darken the bushes. It also increase the sharpness and contrast of the bushes.

For the 3 steps above, I enhance the light and dark areas of the bushes, and paint some branches of some trees in the bushes

Just like the bushes on top of the rock wall, I paint brightest area of the leaves with yellowish green and dark green for the shadow area. I then copy the line art layer and paste it on top of the color layer.

For the cliff between the upper bushes and the bushes on top of the rock wall, I use soft painting technique, where I define the texture of the cliff using brush strokes. I start with yellowish brown as the base color. Then I use the color picker and choose slightly dark color to define the cliff texture. After that I choose slight brighter color than the base color to define the cliff contour that receive the sunlight.

Once done, I proceed with the forest on top of the cliff, behind the upper bush. I define the forest with soft painting technique too as I stick with my previous paint style where I use negative space drawing on for the foreground while the background I've used soft painting.

The trees on the forest are painted one by one for the first few, to make sure they are unique to each other and the details are clear. Then the far forest at the left of the canvas was done as a clump, because details are not clearly seen on such distant.

Then I paint on the sky. Its experimental so  I'll not cover the details here.
Hopefully anyone who read this can learn my digital painting technique that I use here. Any comments and questions are very welcomed.
Thanks for reading