How To Paint Realistic Landscapes Digitally: MasterStudy in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course on learning landscape painting through master studies. My name is James sigma t, and I'm a freelance artist, engineer and writer. And today I'll be your instructor as it goes through the making of this painting. In this course, we're going to be doing a master study as a way of training our creativity to understand how to paint realistic landscapes. In this course, we shall also be learning a lot of things. Some of those include setting up interesting compositions. Shall also be learning how to build different forms and materials such as rocks, water and mountains. Chart also be creating landscapes. Learning how to create landscapes with depth, harmonizing the landscapes values and colors. Training our imagination by implementing our own creative decisions. Fixing flat paintings, color, correcting our walk into harmonious artworks. I've also provided a full brush park in the description of this course so that you can follow along with me. It's videos or sped up. Otherwise, the course would be ten hours long. There are four. Feel free to pause the videos. To think about the course that's deeply as you walk at your own pace. When you're done. You can then come back and resume from where we left off. After this course, you will have learned how to approach any complicated paintings such as this one. And they seek teach to learn from it and knowledge that you'll be able to use in painting other paintings of your own. So I look forward to seeing you in the lessons. 2. Sketching of General Forms: We begin by setting up our canvas and navigation panel shows. The navigator is a small window TO rate in which you can see a thumbnail version of your painting. It will be especially useful when we are walking while zoomed in to our Canvas. Next, we learned the horizon line, which in most cases determines our islands. It will influence how we look at the ships in our composition. There are four, how we draw them. We then welcome to General ships. It is important that you walk from general to specific when sketching or painting. This will help you simplify complex shapes into easy ships. It will also help you set out and balance the shapes in your composition so that they walk well with each other. Establishing points of interest is also something that we do earlier on in our painting. This is so that we see how the ships walk with one another and the composition of a row, and we can make necessary changes where necessary. My point of interest is going to be the tallest mountain. The tallest mountain peak in the background. Make it more straight. Upright. 98 appears in the original painting, the time referencing. 3. Tightening up of shapes: We shall now reduce the opacity of our generous ships layer. On a new layer, we're going to tighten up the ships who walked on previously. Tightening up the ships helps you make the composition more readable. This stage helps us add a little more detail to the general shapes in the composition. You should also use this stage to adjust ships and move them around so that they match the composition relative to each other. Feel free to explore alternative designs to. At this stage, if you feel, if you feel like they could make your composition more interesting, feel free to explore the alternative designs as well. You can see I changed the midground peaks slightly to appear different from the original painting. Because I think this is going to be more interesting than the original composition since I'm going too late, it a little differently. 4. Ground Selection and Making Channels: When we are done laying down the general unpaid internships can make a selection and divide the composition into three sections. We use the lasso tool to create the background, mid ground, and full-grown of the painting. Several selections in channels section by clicking on the channels with a specific selection active, and then clicking on the mask icon, you can then rename the channel to any name that you want. I kept mine with the same names I used when referring to the position of the composition. This way, you'll be able to select them again when needed. 5. Base Color Blockin: Keep the lane walk on the top layer at low opacity, 100 and textured brush begin adding best colors. I use textured brushes from the start when painting these realistic landscapes. As they help you build detail from the start, which can be very helpful when painting this way. Meaning when you're painting realistic paintings, use the selections you made in the previous lesson to help you walk much faster and be more accurate, it is important to think about the color values at each section of the painting. Therefore, even if you're painting best colors, you need to worry those colors so that light and shadow areas can be clearly distinguished, as well as the general forms of your composition. Keep the colors more desaturated as this will help you later when you want to explore different degrees of saturation for different areas. You want to build up the colors instead of fighting them later on, building them up begins with desaturating the initial best colors. 6. Background Mountain: We have added our initial color blocks, but their ships are still flat and undefined without the help of the lane walk. Therefore, we shall begin by eliminating the lane walk and walk on building form and details into the composition. This starts with the background mountain for which we are going to zoom into the painting. This is why you should have your navigator window containing the small thumbnail of our painting open to the side. It will help you know whether the mock search you're making much well with each other. During this detailing odd form starting with clearly defining how light and shadow are interacting with a mountain. Then with your texture brush. Break up those lightened shadow families with the opposing values. For instance, in the lighter areas are the few shadows and contrast them with highlights. That this break can create a rigid visual that will appear as rocks at a distance. The same thing should be done with shadows, although these tables, you should break them with light and contrasting darker tones. Repeat this process until you achieve the result that you want. Watery shall get into this later on in the composition. 7. Red Midground Mountains: Wish our first work, some snow into the background mountains that are actually behind the midground read Mountains, which is helpful so that we avoid visible cutoffs in our walk. Therefore, it seems pointless to paint something if you're going to paint over it, but this is important in establishing realism. You don't want to have visible cards in your return. The line marks to carve out the blocks for the midground. When doing these mixtures, a thick colors you're selecting for the midground are more saturated than the background mountains. This means you will have deeper shadows and software highlights. Shadow in the background mountains is later than the light in this midground mountain. This will help you establish depths in your painting and stop you from flattening out your composition or making, making it boring and marquee, begin with the best colors that give an indication of light and shadow. Paint with broad strokes with an aim of defining the general shapes first. And then when that is done, get rid of the ln, walk a game. Meaning just turn off the linework layer. Repeat what we did in the previous class, where you break up the ships into contrasting elements. Maybe say mean, go to the plains in the shadow, and then paint some light values. They're contrasted with deeper shadows. Shadow colors of the plate. Do this over and over again to create these jagged landscape. Do the same thing for the lighter areas. Remember, keep the ships lose ordinary add detail from your texture brush at this point. 8. Resolution increment and adjusting affected parts: We started our composition with the small canvas, so we need to increase the resolution. For that. We go to Edit, then click on an image says, then change the resolution to pick source or your preferred measurement, and then just bump up the pixel dimensions after which you click okay. You can also just increase the resolution from 72 to 150. This is good if your computer is slow like mine, but needs more detail in the later stages of the painting. Doing this though, will blow your painting. But for me, this is an advantage of increasing contrast between what is in focus and what is not. Again, this is just a hard, It's my technique. You can feel free to use the Torah abundant it. Therefore, if you increase your canvas size and or your resolution, you will have to go back in and add finite details that will be in focus. This is also the time to vary the ship so beat. You are still painting using the same painting techniques we use though, such as painting from general to specific, breaking up the planes with varying color variations and so on. Go back to the background layer and add more details as well. Unless you want it to appear blurry in the final image. Keep zooming in and note to make sure that your values hold. Get the snot ready for detailing. 9. Midground Mountain initial blockins: We're now going to walk on the midground mountains that are in the IC shadows. It is a repetitive process of what we've been doing before. But for this lesson, we shall walk onto the other midground mountain that has vegetation on it fast, would begin by making broad strokes of the colors that will make up a given element. Feel free to explore as you set up the light and shadow areas. For this mountain. I tried to increase the contrast between this orangeish light and the greenish shadows. I thought it was interesting and I wanted to increase that. So anything that you find interesting, make your composition highlight that part more. Yes, when you find something that you like about painting, make it more dominant. As long as it doesn't break the values of the painting. This midground heel is also more saturated than the other two attribute in walking on before. As you can see, that the first midground mountain even has a bluish driven, has bluish shadows, whereas this one has darker greenish shadows. This creates depth between the two paintings of the mountain, mountains and it introduces atmosphere between them. The orangeish lights are also more saturated and brighter. And the oranges, the midground or the background that you've been walking on before this, these are things I need to do in order to create the illusion of depth required to keep this painting more interest, more realistic. Interest. 10. Detailing Midground Mountains With light and shadow: Once we're done with the initial blocking, we are going to tighten up the ships as you prepare to detail. This mountain. Detailing beat is nothing more than a play of light and shadow areas are on different forms. We shall also be using a special leaf brush for this. You can find it in the brush pack provided in this course. When using the leaf brush, you want to only pass highlighted leave strokes where you have, where you have loved patches of orange, and leave some greenish areas to act as shadows. You will also have to use the leaf brush with a green shadow colors to add bugs, some lost shadows. Very brushes to keep an even more interesting composition, as you can see here. So you can use more than one type of brush vegetation. To achieve this. Do not use one leaf brush as it will make your walk repetitive and boring. Don't forget to keep zooming out of the canvas to see how well those colors walk with each other. You can zoom in and out very quickly by clicking Control Plus tab on your keyboard and then dragging on the section of interest, I did not flip the canvas March, but flipping the canvas is very important when painting in general, I'll include a quick tutorial on how to do that here. To add it should cut all go to Edit button and scroll down to the keyboard shortcuts under that, go to Image and expand the options. Then scroll to where your sleep. You'll find flip canvas horizontal and click on it. It will prompt you with a textbox. I personally use control plus F to flip my Canvas so you can input that or you can make it whatever you want. Vary the intensity of the highlights so that this will create a natural light fall-off. These natural aid follow-ups are very important in any realistic painting that has late and shadows. They help you sell the image and make it more realistic. 11. Miground further detailing and water blockin: We are going to continue detailing the midground and walk on the shadows as well. The same way we did with a light, even in the shadows. Form is created by adding shadow and light areas to the shadow planes. This is what I'm doing here. Each hill or mountain folds in a certain value range. Even painting the shadows within shadows or highlights within the ladies. This is important to keep in mind. We shall also welcome the water section in this tutorial to help move our painting uniformly ahead. The water at this section is just to blocking of the several marquee colors. Don't worry much about it. When dealing with painting water, your strokes have to be almost parallel to the horizon line, although you can let them down diagonally Azi, if they're pointing towards a particular vanishing 0.1 to creating shadows in the mountains section. Avoid colors that break the value formerly of the shadow planes. By these same mean you're painting should not have a lot of contrast. 12. Midground Icy Mountains: We're now going to walk on the midground icy mountains in this painting rate, after we add some shadows to this mountain with the eye CBT, we as parsing lighter blue marks over the bluish tone to represent ice. Cold part of the painting. We can define some rocks in the ice tool which will add interest to that part of the painting. Break the monotony of the ice with such rocks and shadow regions. We shall walk in the surrounding rocks that aren't covered in ice. But make sure you keep the values called. Making them bluish. This will help keep your painting believable. You want to add things that will help. So the fiddling that you're trying to portray in the painting, this is why I added the misty beat at the end there to show that this place is cold even though elements seat in my reference image. The midst also helps titles parts of the painting together and gives us separation between that part of the painting are those hills and the foreground. This is very important in creating depths on your paintings. 13. Creating a rock texture brush: We're going to create a rock texture brush from this photo. This is not composer, but I wanted to show you what you can do about creating one or how you can create one. We use a photo for many free stock site and we need the rock beat. So we first crop, then under Select. We'll go to Color Range and then select shadows. The parts in white will be preserved while the parts in black would be deleted. This is what I want, so I'll click Okay, and that will be my selection. Then I can create a new layer and copy paste that selection there. Then I can turn off the previous layer that contains a background, which will leave me with a modified for auto detect now have to make fewer random lens so it has a Brush Preset and get it ready for use in the upcoming tutorials. 14. Forwad midground icy mountains: When using the brush we just created, it is very rudimentary and you might want to make a few changes fast. But they love the Dana museum that it's stamp mix. So use that to build the form of the midground icy mountains bit. If you're using it to paint over landscapes, you might need to fast change a few things in the settings to match the field that you want to go for. Anyway, I quickly switch to another texture brush, unwelcome that stamp a little bit more to come up with an interesting rock formation. This is just a play on values in which we are establishing later and shadow areas. But it is important to keep the value formula is harmonious and close to those over the surrounding landscapes or necessary surrounding elements or the landscape. We can walk on adding more light to the shadow. Italy either in the other greenish mountain that you walked on fast. Stamping such a brush and then using the stamp as a best to define my form helps me achieve very artistic results faster than e firewall to build it all by myself. 15. Foreground Mountain and Flattening Mistakes: We are going to deal with the foreground mountain and treat it the same way we did to the rest. But before that, I'll just add a few strokes to show the water a little better. As I walk my way towards a foreground mountain, Lynn make a selection that will help me map out the silhouette of the foreground mountain better. This mountain is also going to have the most saturated colors as well as the most contrast. This is because the closer things are to us, the more detail we can make out of. This difference. In contrast also helps in establishing depth in a painting. Painting here, I'm trained to use paint to create form. Although it is not a very good idea. If you denote have a general direction for the format you want to create is a big mistake. You want to use. Lanes are reading lines to show you the plains of the plane changes of the elements that you're walking on. So you're better off creating that would sketch marks as guiding blocks so that you can clearly define the forms of the element you want. This method of painting without generally Teams is okay when Dan, two elements that are farther away from the camera, but when you do it to the elements near the camera, it tends to flatten out the element or the lake, in this case the heel as you, as you will see in my painting, and it makes it much harder to correct. 16. Design Definition of Foreground Hill: You can see the time struggling to establish my shadows and lights, something that I would've been that would have been clear and easy. You've had fast tried to study the form. Another issue that flattened lot an image is having a hard cut. Silhouettes. In realistic paintings that seem out of place by hard cut, I mean, using the selection tool and mapping out using those hard edges. In nature, nothing is a very straight lane. Similar to what you might get when you use the lasso tool, what I should have done instead is to make the edges a bit fuzzy so as to soften out the field. Another mistake that makes the images flat exert. You use the same shadow values to define all the different shadow planes. You must vary the shadow and light intensity if you want to create believable ships. 17. Further foreground detailing and water blockins: I'm going to begin taking steps to cover my mistake by creating a few shadow variations using the curves adjustment layer. This requires me to understand how the light is interacting with a rock and how I can use that to define the forms better. I use a curves adjustment layer while walking on the mask. To introduce these shadow variations. I also added these bushy trees to soften some parts of the heart age, as well as the vegetation. The vegetation also helped to soften. Those had ages to break up that line that doesn't exist in nature. I'll leave it for the meantime and walk on water as well. A bit more just to introduce some contrast into it before we insert the reflections. When using a hard brush on water, let it be a flat brush that tangent to the surface. 18. Last detailing and color corrections: We shall continue to vary the shadows in a mountain region, as well as the late regions. This will help us remove that effect of being flat. We then want to add details within, want to detail the water by varying the colors, adding repos and then reflections. Remember to flatten out the brush that you're using. You want the water to have a smooth finish fast. Before you add the repos and reflections. The repos must appear to C2 on the surface of the water and they should be lighter than the rest of the water. You will get the feel for it the more you do it. Don't worry much about it. Then to make the reflections, you are just going to use the selection tool to copy one of the hills. You will select and copy it into a new layer and then rotate the layer so that the image appears upside down to its original. Then you can hide the layer using a mosque. Soft brush, paint some parts of the mask back to reveal a selection. If it is too in terms lower the opacity as well. With that, you will have created a pretty convincing water reflection linearly. You want to apply color adjustment layer to tie all the colors of the painting together. You want to apply a curves adjustment layer to increase the contrast, as well as correct the white balance of the image. Experiment with color adjustment parts until you get what you want. And with these image is complete. 19. Outro and Course Project: This course has been sped up to make sure that I cover all the important topics you need to become good at painting. Your task now should be to paint using the ideas we've talked about. Feel free to revisit the lessons for those areas that have not that may have been too fast. All that you have not understood. Do not Photoshop, brush or much paint. You can create your own brushes door, as we've done in this course. Remember, this is a study that is meant to help you understand foam building color, harmony, composition and so on. So when you're comfortable with the work, I have lived at predicting the description that you can consider doing. After getting it done, please post your work here so that I can take a look and give you feedback where need be. And those students will also be able to help you. With helpful feedback has worked. My socials for art are gems at James and as core is KG on Instagram and James psychomotor on YouTube. That is it for this course. Please share your feedback as well so that other students can know whether or not his course will be useful for them. Your feedback will also be very helpful as they walk on posting more courses. So please let it be genuine. That is it for this course. Thank you for watching.