After pulling a couple of reference photos off of the Internet, I was able to finagle this nice little rock formation and tree trunk texture into the foreground. As you can see, the top of the tree was cropped off in the photo so I had to create my own branches up top. Those squiggles may not look like much now, but I’m about to plaster leaves over top of them, so here’s where things really start to get complicated.
Over the years, I’ve built up my own library of customized Photoshop brushes. Ever since Photoshop 7, brush sets have been ridiculously easy to create on your own. You can even save your brush sets and port them to other computers.
In my line of work (architectural illustration), I have to paint a lot of trees and landscaping shrubbery. One of my most reliable mainstays is “vine1â€ÂÂÂ- my all purpose leaf brush. In the “Brush Name†window you can see the single three-leaf shape I originally used to create the brush. If you are so inclined to make a similar brush, you can follow the instructions I lifted from the Photoshop manual and copy / paste the leaf image right out of the Brush Name window in this picture if you like (though you would want to create a white background and eliminate the number “56†from the picture – just make your image size 56 pixels square and you’re good to go).
As you can see in the upper potion of this image, I have also created “starfield†brushes and “forest†brushes for previous projects. You can use pretty much any shape you like to create new brushes in Photoshop, any shape that you think bears multiple repetition is fair game. But picking the brush shape is only the beginning of your journey…
After you have your brush shape, you can now decide how that shape will express itself when you actually press down on the mouse button. As you can see, there are six different brush dynamics for you to play with. This brush only tweaks three dynamics: Shape, Scattering, and Color. I’ve listed all the different dynamic parameters that I set for this particular brush. On the lower right, I’ve provided a couple of brush stroke examples using the same dull green color to illustrate what impact tweaking the brush dynamics can have on just one brush stroke. The most important dynamics for this particular brush are the Angle Jitter and the Scatter / Count Jitter. These brush parameters define how often the brush shape will be repeated, how far apart they will be scattered, and varies the angles at which the leaves will be positioned within the brush stoke. I don’t have any hard or fast rules for painting leaves, I just tinker with the brush dynamics until I’m happy with the end result.
One end result I was happy with eventually became my number one foliage brush (hence the name). You can pick any brush out of your brush palette and rename while retaining the same dynamics. This brush is the same “vine1†brush with the Color Dynamics turned off and the Roundness Jitter of the Shape Dynamics turned up to 45 percent. This helps orient the leaf shapes so that it appears as if they might be pointing toward you or away from you instead of just being rotated around. The Scattering Jitter has also been pumped all the way up to 256 percent, spraying the leaf shapes much further apart than before. And I haven’t even started placing the leaves in separate layers yet…
So, here, there are actually several different layers of leaves: straight black in back, dark to light greens in the middle, salmon to pink leaves after that, and pale yellow highlights on top. Originally, there were at least four different layers of leaves with four different colors using the same “foliage #1†leaf scattering brush in each layer. I’ve been so spoiled by customized Photoshop brushes that I can’t imagine ever having to paint individual leafs by hand ever again. Can you? Even the low lying ferns dotting the rock formation are just the same weed shapes repeated over and over again, twisted and turned with the Edit > Free Transform tool and overlapped until they cover the rocky outcropping.
Whatever happened to that Amazon vixen that was supposed to fill most of the foreground? I’m glad you asked!
Here is a smattering of reference photos. I’m reasonably certain that bits and pieces of the river photo in the upper left were used to build the rocky outcropping in the foreground. The leopard spot collection in the upper right-hand corner should come in handy later (you’ll just have to trust me on this).
The female form in the lower left is the raw Poser 5 render of our lovely Amazon princess. Rendering figures in Poser is a whole other tutorial. Suffice it to say that Poser is a poor man’s human figure modeler for those of us who can’t afford to hire real live nude models to pose for us while we sketch. It’s not a particularly flexible rendering package, but it does let you change the color and positioning of the lights which provides for nice volumetric core shadows and highlights, plus it helps you adjust the skin tones to your liking.
Poser comes with several preset figure poses for standing, sitting, walking, etc. But you really need to know a thing or two about human anatomy in order to tweak the poses and still have them look relaxed and natural looking. I know that our Amazon gal will have to be holding a spear (just to show that she’s a member of the warrior class), but why try to reinvent such a pose when I know that umpteen hundred years ago ancient Greek sculptors already did their homework on human figures bearing spears? In fact, I’m pretty sure the sculpture on the lower right is actually called “The Spear Bearer†and was posed prim and proper for just such an occasion. The lower middle figure is a Roman marble replica of the bronze Greek statue on the right, which neatly provides a similar stance to compare to our Poser figure. The main difference is that the “spear bearer†is actually bearing his spear, whereas our lovely Amazon lady is resting the butt of her spear on the ground. So there are adjustments to be made…
