The Green World: Painting Forest Exteriors!

Painting forest exteriors takes what you know about painting digital trees and expands on it to cover an entire forest.

The basic elements are the same: a background layer for the foliage, a middle ground layer for the trunk, and the foreground layer for the leaves.

The challenge here is to divide the trees into its own element without overlapping other trees so that it doesn't look like a row of foliage across the digital canvas.

Are you ready to get started? Fire up your digital art tools and let's begin!

1. Background layers

Painting forest exteriors require sampling from the environment colors around the forest. So, we must start painting a setting to put our forest in. A simple blue sky followed by a grassy hill would be ideal.

You are more than welcomed to try your own background environment. This should be on a layer on its own for the purpose of colors sampling. The eyedropper tool is very useful here to sample individual colors.

On a new layer, begin to paint your foliage pattern using a light greenish blue tint. Make it uneven to represent trees of different height. Use your smudge tool to create the illusion of branches and trees.

Preserve the transparency to work on the outlines of this forest silhouette. Paint in some random tree trunks so you know where the depth of your forest layers are.

2. Middle ground and foreground layers

This section of painting forest exteriors deals with creating the shapes of the trees in front of the silhouette. This can get complicated and difficult because you need to draw random trees that not only cater to depth perception, but in vast amounts that are still distinguished well from another.

For overlapping trees, you need to work with different ranges of the same color. Generally speaking, you paint with a clear green color for trees that are in front while mixing colors closer to the silhouette colors to show trees farther behind.

Furthermore, you need to think about the individual trees itself. Do not forget the lesson on painting digital trees where you deal with creating foliage highlighting different levels of light intensity. In other words, where the light source hits and fails to hit.

3. Adding mass

Depending on where you place your light source, begin painting the angle at which the sun hits the trees. If it it hitting from the front, it means you must tune up the color intensity of the trees in front.

If, however, it is hitting it from the back, you need to paint the highlights around the trees in addition to painting more shadow elements within the trees. This is because the sunlight can not shine through all those foliage at this angle.

Don't forget to paint the actual shadows being caste onto the ground. You will need to extend the shadows depending on how high your light source is.

I've also added a few plants and flowers around the trees to add a bit of realism.

4. Finishing touches

At the end of the day, painting forest exteriors applies a lot of knowledge gained from a solid art foundation. It will be incredibly difficult if you did not know about light, shadow, perspective, and color theory.

The finishing touches takes in this step deals with unifying the entire picture as a whole. You may need to play with different color combinations, layer functionality, and filters to get what you want.

I would suggest using the sharpen tool to bring out individual leaves that will help create depth from one tree to another. Use your dodge and burn tools to create contrasting light and shadow.

It's all about refining what you already have. Don't be afraid to slow down and study each individual tree. Duplicate the layer and rearrange it if necessary to make more trees. With the digital art tools available, there are so many open-ended ways for painting forest exteriors and to create the look you want.

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