The Green World: Painting Forest Interiors!

The art of painting forest interiors comes from the ability to see mass, color, and light. Following the lessons in this site has provided you the foundation to see these elements.

Despite the abundance of color and mass, you should never focus on all the details. Doing so would take too much time as well as causing you to miss important elements that makes your trees stand out.

A few keys to notice is the overall color tone. Some warm colors that can come through are various shades of yellow from the sunlight, bouncing off the green foliage, and from the color of the tree barks.

There are slight hints of cool blue colors as well from the sky reflecting off the shadow of the foliage. This will be the predominant mid-tones that you need to concentrate on near the end.

1. Background layers

Start off with a simple and rough colored gesture painting. Don't think too much about the specifics and start creating mass with your digital brushes.

Use a large chalk brush to fill in large areas of green. Then, think about your light source. Switch to a lighter color to paint the overall light source. Try to create a gesture painting of gradients.

After that, start deciding where your tree trunks will be. Use a brown hue and begin painting rough outlines of the trunks. These will be your mass of trees to build your painting around.

Again, painting forest interiors in this step does not need a lot of details. You just want to get the initial composition down.

2. The details of painting forest interiors

On new layers, begin to slowly add details starting from the tree barks. The best way to do this it to pick up a think chalk brush and paint where the light hits. You may need to sample from the light source area done in the first step.

After that, think about the foliage. Remember to set the scatter option so you can quickly splatter the shapes of small leaves covering the trees and background area.

Switch between the different layers whenever you need to. One thing to keep in mind is to paint additional branches or trunks in the background to show a forest.

At the same time, keep these trunks broken apart in various sections to give the illusion of foliage overlapping the trunks. This is the effect of suggestion in action here without doing a lot of details.

3. Details of the foreground

Some things to consider are the actual leaves and unique branches protruding from the foreground. Use this as a good opportunity to learn how to paint the leaves and branches instead of just splattering color everywhere.

You can use predefined brushes to paint random leaf pattern or you can paint it freehand. The choice is up to you. Just know that you have more control painting freehand, obviously.

In this example, I have also added a small stream. Notice that I did not paint the water. Instead, I only suggested that it is a stream from the bank near the trees and the reflections of the trunks into the water.

4. Color control and finishing touches

The first couple of steps is looking for opportunity to present more mass through shadows that you may have missed. The shadow of the trunks need to flow with the forest floor.

In other words, it cannot be just a simple straight line and must adhere to the bumps and indentations of the forest floor.

You can add a few more white spaces near the light source to show empty pockets of foliage. I have opted not to do this because I wanted a thick forest.

Next is how to deal with color correction. You need to include some blue mid-tones, as stated before, because you want to create the mood of a cool forest ground that is barely touched by sunlight. Create a blanket color to overshadow the forest floor.

There are other tools at your disposal such as the sharpen tool to bring out additional foliage or the blur tool to smudge the barks a bit. Don't forget about the dodge and burn tools to create added contrast.

With practice, painting forest interiors can become second nature as long as you constantly seek out how to define mass with proper light and shading techniques.

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