Paint a dead tree on rocks

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Step 5:

The shading with burn/dodge didn't satisfy me totally, so I overworked it by taking a low-opaque brush with very bright or dark colours and painting them over the tree. As you can see I also started painting the rocks. Here you can choose a bigger-sized brush, they don't need so much detail. I also decided to remove the very small rocks I had in the basic sketch, they didn't fit the look of image. I wanted big and smooth rocks. It's always nice to have some small details like cracks. Cracks are easy to paint. Be sure to have a small brush size, I use 1 or 2 pixels. Choose a very dark colour and paint your crack. Then change the colour to a very bright one and paint next to the dark line, following it. On cracks you can always see the light on one side of the crack, otherwise it has no depth.

Step 6:

Painted some more rocks and shaded them.

Step 7:

I felt that the image lacks of depth, so I added a big rock in front of the others. Also started some work on the background. I took a very big brush at low opacity and made a few strokes which are my sun. I never had the intention to make a really bright sun, rather wanted to keep it diffuse, like hidden behind dust. You know that when the sun sets you see the sky reddish/yellow enlightened by it.

Step 8:

I finished the rocks here. You may notice that the rocks to the right don't have so much detail like the ones to the left. That's because I knew I would darken that part later to match my lighting conditions.

Step 9:

So far all my colours were very pale and low-saturated. So I duplicated the layer with the painting and set it to soft light. You can also try out overlay if you like it more. Also I intensified my shading a lot, mostly by using dark or bright colours which I painted over the image at low opacity. The light comes out of the background, so the rocks had to be rather dark since they aren't directly hit by the light. Watch out on the tree's branches and roots, the have a bright and a dark side too. I added a small shadow of one of the roots on the rocks to underline that it is hanging free. Not quite sure if that is correct in terms of the lighting but hey, I am the artist
In the background I added some colour were I wanted to be a landscape later. The image needs some background for perspective.

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