The mountains in here are simple; I just used the same colour as the ground and blocked them in. The shapes don’t all have to be the same, just mix it up a little bit. As the mountains go further into the background, they drop in saturation and detail. Once you have your mountains blocked in, you’ll have to highlight them from the sun beams, using a lighter brown or yellow. Use a size 4 brush with Pen Pressure to scribble some light source on them.
In step 10, you’re going to be starting to smooth out the colours some more, bring down the hard shapes, and blend over the other clouds. To do this, I used a soft brush with Flow turned on. Lowering the opacity to 10%, you can really start to blend those hard edges in with the soft ones within a few strokes. We’re also going to use this step on the bottom, underneath the clouds. In step 9, they looked way too hard to be in the sky, so we need to patch those up, by again going over in strokes. As you can see, I’ve also gone and shaped the bottom mountains again, making them looked formed and not just “thrown in” there. I’ve also gone ahead and added some more negative space to the clouds on the right side and at the top, so they don’t hog up the entire picture.
Now you might be thinking, “whoa, where did that bottom come from?” Well I decided to open the picture more, so it’s not so one sided. I obviously took some inspiration from the Route 66 drive. To help extend the perspective, I added some telephone poles down the road; it gives it a longer feel. In the clouds, I wanted to add some bloom. I use a soft brush set to Screen, and pick a pretty pale blue to fill in those negative space spots in the clouds, as if the sky is pushing through. I blotched in some other colours to the central white cloud because it felt too strong.
Now for the road texture. I created a dark brown texture on a new layer that would fit inside the road space, and used Filter > Texture > Grain on it. After I had the right texture I wanted, I set the Layer Mode to Overlay. I then painted two white lines down the road, as well as the yellow follow lines in the middle. Using a brush on Overlay, I created some glare off the sun onto the road.
For the final step, I wanted to fill in the ground on the sides of the road with something simple. So I used a Grass brush.
Next, I started to fill in my grass/weeds around the area. Then I used the dodge tool (with a soft brush) and started to highlight the pavement some more. You can create some oil stains on the ground, or use a light colour and create some more glimmered speckles of the ground or rubble. And that’s it for this tutorial!
More work from Adonihs can be found at http://adonihs.deviantart.com/
This tutorial is used by permission from 2DArtist Magazine - Monthly Concept Art, Digital and Matte Painting Magazine for Digital Creatives.Visit 2Dartist Magazine and pick up the latest issue!
