PROCESS VIDEO // mountain trail - part 2

Here's part 2 of my process for my mountain trail painting! Part 1 is here.

Here’s some information about this process video: 

• It has been sped up by 200%, so 2 times the original speed. 

• This painting session took me a bit over 7 hours, split up into multiple sessions.

• I edited the process into three parts. This is part two of three!

• I mostly used the hard round brush from my own brush set to paint this. I also used a lot of brush & smudge combinations to paint and then soften edges. The smudge tool I used the most was the scrappy smudge brush from Yuming Li’s brush collection.

• This is painted in Adobe Photoshop. You can replicate a similar workflow inProcreate, with the exception of the gradient tool and the number of layers used! 

Here are some helpful resources that can help understand this process in more detail: 

• Environment essentials: this tutorial breaks down my process for drawing environments into the most basic and essential steps, and especially talks about how I layer my detail from front to back - similarly to what I did in this painting process!

• Drawing environments in Procreate: if you’re curious about how you could translate a process like this one into Procreate, this is a great video to check out! 

ADDING COMPLEXITY

At the beginning of this video, my main issue is that everything is looking too smooth. That’s because I blocked in the shapes one by one, which creates clean edges and smooth gradients. It’s ideal for a more sleek and simplified look, but I want this painting to be more textured and have some more depth to it. So the main thing I focus on during this phase is building up that complexity! I do that with textured brushes, so you’ll often see me typing different search terms into the brush window to find new ones that I can use - I have so many brush sets by now that it’s super helpful to be able to search them. I also use image overlays: basically taking photos, setting them to overlay, and blending them into the image! I feel like this works best if you only use it for specific areas and paint over it later. The pictures I use are all ones that I took myself on various hikes, which adds a lot of meaning to this painting for me! 

TAKING CONTROL OF MY LAYERS

My process for landscapes involves using a TON of layers. I basically add every detail on a new layer so I can easily shift it or change things. It’s really difficult for me to keep up with this, though! Sometimes I have no idea which layer I’m on and I get completely lost. I tend to be really messy with layers in the early stages, but as I start to finalize my painting more, I’ll try to minimize them and organize them into separate groups. At this stage, I’m working with 4 main groups: the clouds at the top, the foreground, the mid-level area, and the mountains/sky in the background. 

GREEN

Green is a color I struggle with a lot. It very quickly looks toxic or neon, and it’s hard to combine with other colors. Somehow it quickly feels off! I did some environment studies earlier this month that resulted in a lot of green/brown color combinations, which can be beautiful but also really heavy and dense. In order to keep this color scheme more fresh, I go for a more desaturated green and combine it with more intense cyan/cobalt tones. It’s a tough balance to strike but I feel like this makes the green more balanced with the other colors, rather than being fully dominant! 

I hope you enjoy it - part 3 is coming right up!