Paint a dead tree on rocks

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Intro:

This is a walkthrough for my last painting The Last Remainder. You can find the painting here. I want to show you the general process of my work and maybe give you some guidance for how to work on a painting.

Step 1:

This is the first step. Most times I sketch down my idea on paper first, it's a quick way to work and you can try out different ideas. I gave the tree a somehow weird shape, to underline that it is a special one, the last. I scanned the sketch and increased the contrast a little. This is going to be the basis for my painting.

Step 2:

Here I created a simple colour gradient to give myself an idea of how the backgrounds colours will be later. Also I started to block in the general colours of my rocks and of the tree. It is important that you watch out not to let the background (the gradient) show through your block colours. They are the bases for your later painting, so you won't have to cover every spot with strokes. I made this mistake myself and had to do a lot of corrections later.

Step 3:

I started to paint the tree, by choosing a hard brush on sizes between 1 and 4 pixel. The small size allows to give the tree some structure. It's good to have a tablet so that you can use the pen pressure options in the brush rollout. I used mostly similar colours for the tree, since I wanted it to look rather bare, smoothed by wind and dust.

Step 4:

The first step of painting the tree was done, so I started to shade it a bit. the burn/dodge tools work great here. The shading is a very important part because it gives your shapes volume and defines were the light comes from. Anyway I shaded only a little here, since I do the main shading always in the end.

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