The Painting Process
Here is the background with a few sample colors of the foreground I was experimenting with. This is a photo of clouds off my royalty-free clouds disk that came with Photoshop. I could have painted this myself, but I found an image that was suitable for the piece. It saved me some time to make my deadline. Of course, I did adjust the colors and contrast from the original image to more closely match what I had in mind. I also painted in a few details to sharpen them up a bit.
The sun is on its own layer between the sky and the mountains. I filled a circular selection area with a bright yellow color, added about 24-28 pixels of Gaussian blur and set the layer blending mode to Color Dodge. This gave a nice yellow/orange glow to the corona and simulated atmospheric haze. I adjusted the opacity of the layer to about 70% so some of the background clouds would show through a little and look like they were drifting across in front. The transparency does not show up in this particular screen shot since I did that later in the process.
Here is a closer view of the background mountains. The colors were sampled from the basic sky colors using the Eyedropper tool and painted in progressive stages. After creating a new layer on top of the background, I started with the farthest mountain and painted the basic shapes. Generally, I will create a new layer and name it “Palette” and paint several brush strokes in different values that i can sample throughout the course of painting. Like a traditional palette holding physical paint, the Palette layer allows me a mixing area off the canvas where I can create several values of a color and refer back to them easily. It’s much faster than trying to keep accessing the Color Picker over and over and trying to match the same selected color from before.
Here is a closer view of the mountains. This is at 50% of the original image size. After creating a middle tone for each mountain and the foreground hills, I added darker and lighter shades of the same colors for shadowy areas and highlights. The brightest areas of the mountaintops were colors sampled with the Eyedropper very close to the sun area. The process I used to create the texture on the mountains was the same used for the cliff face in the next section and is detailed there.
