In The Forest Process

For ascaparma, and people who have asked about my process.

This piece was created in Photoshop CS4 using a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet. The time taken was probably about 6-7 hours but not all at the same time as during stage three I felt like the piece was not working (due to my impatience!) and thought about giving in!

The best thing to do when this happens is to walk away from the work for a while. Sometimes it can be a few days sometimes a few weeks. Funnily enough I went for a hike to the very place that inspired this image.

So a few days later I started work on stage four and everything just clicked, and within two or so hours I had it finished.
I decided to add the figure at the last minute to give a sense of scale.

In photoshop I used to use millions of custom brushes. I still have all of them but I tend now to use pretty much standard brushes with a few textures, and various settings with the opacity and flow options for each brush. It is amazing also combined with the spacing how each of these parameters can affect the feel of a brush. All of these are saved as tool presets so can be accessed easily and quickly.

I create quite a lot of my own brushes as I go along, for example some of the leaves in this picture were done by drawing some leaf shapes and making a brush with a great deal of scatter to achieve the look I wanted. I also like to play with the colour values after the image is complete. In this case I cooled the image a touch to add the early morning feel I desired.

Thank you for all your comments as they mean a great deal to me.

Tone