Introduction to Drawing Forest Environments

1. Introduction: Hey, hey, do. It's clean here. And in this lesson, what we're going to be learning about is how to draw forest environments. I'm going to show you how to build them from the ground up what to include, how to represent it. Things like trees, grass and foliage in that comic book styled format. In fact, we're going to take a look at some examples of how other artists within our field have represented these types of mother natuy assets, if you will, I guess that's something you could call them, something you could categorize them as. And most importantly, we're going to have a lot of fun because the most wonderful thing about drawing forest environments, really any sort of natural environment is that it's organic. It can kind of be structured and built however you like. And a lot of the time, that's why these sorts of environments make for such wonderful compositional aids to frame your characters and to give them platforms to stand on. So we're going to be talking about all of that in this lesson, and I can't wait to jump into it with you. Without further ado, I see we jump straight into this and get started. 2. Forest Environment Examples: First thing that I'm going to show you is some examples from other artists of how they've actually represented these more natural forest environments within their own artwork. So let's take a look at them. So as you can see here, we have one by Frank Frazetta, right? And I want you to just take a look at how Frank has used a combination of shadow and negative space in order to represent the leaves up here. Look at that. You know, it's important to understand that when it comes to drawing forest environments, a lot of the form that will come about from things like leaves is going to be shown through the drop shadows that we place underneath. And what is this going to give our foliage? It's going to give it depth. It's going to give it solidity. It's going to make it look more three dimensional, and most importantly, it's going to break the image up. Now, when we think about drawing environments such as this, we consider that we might be drawing individual leaves, individual blades of grass, but if you look real closely, what you're going to see here is that, in fact, well, a lot of these things are suggested. Like, if we look at the grass here, it looks grassy. It feels soft to walk on. It's certainly not made of concrete or dirt necessarily. But at the same time, you'll notice that there's very minimal amount of detail that are needed in order for that grassy feel to come across. It sort of all blends together. This is a really neat trick. Hinting at various textures and materials within an environment sometimes is all that's needed for it to really come across in the way that you want. You'll notice the same thing with the leaves. Now in this particular example, we can see that the individual leaves are in fact somewhat defined. If we go down here though, you can see that there's mushrooms over here, little plants and weeds and whatnot. They all blend together into these silhouettes that we see appearing on the ground. And blending these elements together, by the way, it once again just makes it look that much more natural. So we're going to be particularly interested in trying to replicate that within our examples. Now, if we look over here, we can see some more stuff from Frank Frazetta. Once again, we're looking at a lot of blending. Now, we might have around the tiger some individual blades of grass that are shown. Now just look at the way that this grass has been created, though. You can see that we've got some whites laid on blacks, and it's through those separations of value that we get the shape of grass start to come into focus, start to appear on the page. Okay? We've got these beautiful environmental elements, the tree that's been struck by lightning or I guess it's more dead tree of some kind. And you'll notice that the grass sort of blends into it. Now, if we look at the bottom portion of this particular this particular natural element, it sort of just blends out into the negative space. Okay. Same thing here with the foreground. Blends out there. All right. And once more, some more frozetta stuff. Look at these plants, all blending together, some suggestions of weeds and whatnot, but some moss over here, some nice texture on the tree trunk. Beautifully done, wonderfully executed, and some more examples there as well, right? So I want you to just take that in for a moment. We're going to jump back over here and have a look at some Oh, this is Frank Frazetta, too. I thought it was Alfredo Alcala, but there you go. So Frank Frazetta is obviously, you know, a master of drawing natural environments within this comic book style format. And just look at the variety that we see here. It's not all the same. It's not all the same leaves. It's not all the same plants and grass. It's a variety because that's sort of what mother nature gives you when we're talking about non man made environments. It's somewhat random. It's mixed up. It gets mixed up a little bit. It creates some variation. All right? So should give you an idea as to the sort of environments that we're going to be illustrating here throughout the demonstration. Keep those in mind. Take a look at them. Really, if you need to pause the video, do that and even jump online for yourself. Look up Frank Frazetta, black and white, natural environments or forest environments. And you'll find many of these same examples. Like I said, Alfredo Alcala is another really good one Bernie Wrights and two, depending on the style that you like to go for with your comic book art, but I do find these to be very inspiring. And like I said, if you're ever wondering, you know, how do I depict grass? How do I depict a tree or a mushroom or a tree trunk? Well, guess what? There's plenty of examples out there that you can look at in order to determine how you might go about the process, what sort of finished presentation you want to be striving toward. So I highly do recommend that you find those references because they're going to show you how to do it. They're going to tell you what to do. And that's much better than just guessing and ending up with something that looks unprofessional. If you want to do professional work, find professional examples of how it should look in terms of the subject matter that you're trying to portray. 3. Framing, Perspective and Composition: All right. So like I said, the main thing here is that we want to have fun and you can have so much of a great time actually drawing these more natural environments because they don't need to look any particular way. We're going to zoom right in here and Clip Studio Paint. That's the drawing application of choice that I've got going here. Using the Mark Brunt legendary Line art brush. You can download that from Mark Brunt. It's free, and it is a wonderful brush to use for sketching in particular. Now, we could ink this out, but I think we're going to keep it with just the pencil tool here, some sketching, nothing too finished, too refined. And in a later lesson, we'll get into more specifics. So, you know, really zooming in on how to draw just a tree or just a weed, you know, really drawing an assortment of different environmental elements that you might use in a forest scene. For now, we're going to go for a macro approach. We're going to be having a look at the overall representation of a forest environment with all of those elements thrown into the mix. The first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to jump over to the ruler tool and we get our figure ruler selected and then I'm going to lay down a frame that we're going to be working within. That'll just about do it. Then what I'm going to do is grab my pencil tool, and we're just going to run around excuse me, we're going to run around the outside edge of this frame and define it. Like so. There we go. Once that's done, we'll get rid of the ruler, right click, delete, and then we're going to reposition this frame on the canvas right in front of us there. Wonderful. We'll make a brand new layer up here. We can label these layers if we want. We can just call this frame so we don't get mixed up. I should probably show you how to do this properly. You don't want to be taking on these bad habits of not naming your layers. We can just call this sketch. Okay. Now, I'm just going to show you one example here. We're going to take some time on it. We're really going to try to get that rendering in there, the details as opposed to just drawing up a bunch of roughs. We can of course, do that in another lesson, too. But for now, we're going to really take our time on this scene. We'll start out by determining what, of course, the perspective is going to be simply by placing down a very light horizon line. Let me make a new layer for that one. We'll call this perspective. And really, you don't need a perspective grid for a forest environment, as you might imagine simply because well, you know, we're not drawing any buildings. There's not really anything that needs to be aligned to perspective. But what we are going to do is we will at least place down a horizon line, like so. All right? So we're going to click from one side to the other, and we're just going to set that horizon line at about the midway point of this frame. We're going to try to get it as straight as possible. Well, my sticky keys turned on there for no good reason. Love when that happens. There we go. There's our horizon line. Now what's the horizon line? It's just our eye level within the scene. It's not going to be too crazy and dynamic. We're keeping it relatively just at the midway point. We're not looking down. We're not looking up. We're just looking at a standard head level view. We're in a sketch layer now, and it's time to just start a sketch, and this is the hardest part is getting anything, something down onto the page. I'm going to look at my references here to try and give me some ideas. And I like to start out with just large shapes to begin with. Now, we can break this scene up into thirds, of course, I know these aren't very equal thirds, but the thing about breaking a scene up into thirds is that it helps with composition, okay? So you don't actually have to draw these thirds down, but it is nice to visualize them just inside your mind. 4. Drafting the Scene: So with that said, we could say, well, this third over here is going to be taken up with maybe some rock formation. Look how light that is. Look how sketchy and rough we've got that. It's working beautifully for now. That's working good. Now, what we want to try to do with every scene that we create is we want to produce depth within the scene and what that means, the easiest way to do that is to have a foreground, a middle ground, and of course, a background. So this here that I'm adding in is probably more of a middle ground element. And then what I'm going to do is I want to create a bit of a path. I always like to have a path for the eye to follow. I'm going to sketch that in real rough. It's probably going to go over into the third on the left, and it's going to twist back around like so, and we'll have it go into the horizon there. Okay? Now, you're probably looking at this and you're going, Clayton, this looks so messy, I can't even tell what's going on. What are you placing down here on the page? And I'm telling you this is going to come into focus. We're going to dial that focus knob, and you'll start to see a clearer representation of what's happening here. But this is a lesson in and of itself. Keep your work as loose as possible at the start. Alright Keep it loose and make sure that you're giving yourself room to sculpt out the image. All right. I'm going to come over here and create a tree that's probably going to sit on this third division on the left, and I'm going to scribble that out. We might make a bit of a silhouette here for the tree too, by the way. Now, it's not entirely framed as nicely as I would like this particular tree, but that's right. I'll do for now. I want these roots to come down over the land formation that the tree is sitting upon. It's going to come all the way down there to the ground. Like, so, we'll get our eraser out. I want to get rid of some of that. Now, like I said, what you're looking at here, I know, I know. To you, it probably just looks like a whole bunch of scribble. What do I focused on first and foremost as I draw this out? I want large shapes, okay? I want to get a lay of the land. I'm blocking it out. Large shapes that represent the land formations, the trees here, so you can see these giant roots that I'm placing down for the tree, having them run down and along the cliff there. And into the middle ground, the foreground. And these leaves up here, I want to have them basically creating a bit of a tunnel actually around this section I've decided. It's a very large tree that I'm creating there. This might even be a primary focus of the image. So it's good to have a focal point, of course, within anything that you draw. We might come down here and create another land formation. 5. Rendering the Tree: Now, this is even going to get a little complex for me to look at in a moment. So what I am going to do just so that we're not getting too confused here is I'm going to start to maybe refine some of what we're seeing. So I'm going to go ahead here and lay in some more details for the leaves, and I'll also determine where the light source is at this point. I'm just going to have it coming in from the top left. What that's going to mean is that the details of the trunk, the tree are going to be more prominent and darkened on the right hand side of it. You can see those textures running down and around the roots there. In terms of a finished drawing, this is really going to be a sketch. That's where we're going to keep it as far as the polish is concerned. Simply because it would take us a while, in fact, to fully detail everything out and clarify it. But we will show some individual examples of how to draw trees to their full level of polish in another lesson. And maybe even do a proper workshop on a full environment from start to finish, where we spend like eight to 9 hours actually drawing out a full blown environment and bringing it through to a finish level. But for now in this lesson, consider this as an introduction as to how you would approach the process. So what I'm doing here with the roots is I'm just trying to capture a little bit a texture within them, okay? And what we really are striving to achieve there is the sort of effect where it feels as though we might be able to run our finger along this particular area of the tree and feel some roughage. Now, the other thing that these textures do is they help to describe the surface form of the tree, okay? So you can see how as I lay in these textures around the roots, they actually running around the cylindrical form of the roots. Okay? And you can break everything down in these very simple forms, by the way. You know, a tree is really just a cylinder at the end of the day. The roots coming off the tree are just cylinders. Worms, basically, you can think of them as. We're going to do that. As you'll notice, it can take some time to draw these natural environments, but they're really fun because you get to add in these details that really do build up the environment as you continue to work, the more details you add in, the better it starts looking. Once you got those texture details in there, you can if you want to even start to add in some rendering. Like so. Now that might be a little early to start adding rendering, but I do want to just show you how we might begin that process. And this rendering is really just little cross hatches that I'm placing down onto the page. Okay. And you don't even have to necessarily add these cross hatches in if your style doesn't lend toward it. I mean, at the end of the day, we all have different levels of detail that we like to incorporate into our art, and there's just some styles out there that aren't going to require that much detail. I don't feel like you need to add these cross hatches in necessarily. This is just something I like to do with my work. I am somewhat of a more detail oriented artist, especially for these forest environments, I enjoy the process of making some of those details sing some drop shadows in on that trunk. This rendering really does help to complete the three dimensional look that we might want to go for. Now, the thing is that we're very far from done here. I'm just sort of honing in on the tree at this point of time so that we can see a more clarified presentation for at least one environmental element as we build out the rest. I'm going to go through here and very quickly add in the rendering for this root. And once you get a hang of it, and you really start to develop a technique for how you go about this stuff and maybe copy mine, maybe you decide to experiment for yourself, figure out what works for you. You'll notice that this can come together quite quickly. Especially if you're not overthinking it. And I would say with natural environments, yeah, you know, you don't want to overplan those. You don't want to overthink them too much, simply because they don't really require it. You know, it's not like you need an architect. You really just want to lay something down onto the page that feels good to you that looks nice. And as long as you're able to get that down, then you'll be good to go. All right. Next, we're going to jump over here to this route, and I am going to start to speed up simply because we've got a little bit of a time limit on this lesson, and we don't want to dawdle. We never want to dawdle with our art. That makes us overthink things, overwork things, and that's never going to be a good sign. It's not going to necessarily lend to a better finished product. Over here, we're going to start to add in a little bit more grass and foliage around the base of this mound that the tree is sitting upon. Some grassiness, let's say. And look, I'm going to look at frozetta in order to determine how we might want to make this look. You know, we might have some grass there coming out and down. And then we'll have it sort of thicken up toward the bottom, creating that nice sort of natural feel. All right. And you can see how that just, you know, it really does start to stand out in a nice way is something that feels very much organic. That's really what we want to be going for here first and foremost is organic. All right? What do I mean by that? I mean that we don't want to make it look too contrite. We don't want to make it look man made or fake or artificial, creating a certain amount of randomness in what it is we're placing down into the scene, in other words, we want the leaves to somewhat be non uniform. We want those roots to be running in all different directions and want there to be that randomness. Now as we get toward the bottom here, around this section, we're going to have, let's draw in a bit of a rock along the path, right? And once more, we're going to have a little bit of grass there around the base. There we go. So now that I've sort of shown you a more detailed presentation for the roots, as an example, we're going to continue the process of plotting out exactly what it is. We're going to be showing in this scene. Don't be afraid to use your eraser. It's there for a reason, especially during that all important penciling stage. Yes, we want that there. We want the eraser there to lean on when things need to be adjusted, need to be corrected. All right. So this is a rock that I'm adding in along the path. You can see there that I'm adding in some rendering and trying to make it look once more textural. Adding in those details, you know, they make all the difference. Now, if you got a style that's a little bit more Joe Madish or Michael Turnerish now, Michael Turner actually did some pretty crazy detailed environments, but, you know, consider what sort of style you enjoy working in most. Maybe you're not going to go for that insanely rendered ultra realistic look. That's totally fine, you know? Normal environments or natural environments, they can look very, very nice with a minimal amount of detail. Of course, I'm showing you an example of a pretty detailed one. But Certainly, I think that you could appropriate some of this, you know. And, of course, finding examples of environments, like I said at the beginning, from artists who draw in the style that you like, of the environments that they create, that's going to be something that aid you in a very significant way. So you can see here I'm not detailing across the entire region there. What I'm doing is I'm sort of you know, leaving it at certain points, fairly blank with a decent amount of negative space just because, hey, you know, like, I want to create some depth here. If I shade along the entire area, it's going to flatten everything out. Right? So contrast is key if you want readability within your art. Alright. So we've got the rock there. We got the tree roots. I see that we jump over here and we start to lay in some of the details that we might witness with the leaves. And check this out. This is going to be a lot of fun, okay? I'm going to show you a real nice trick here. We're, in fact, going to leave all of this stuff up here, okay? All these leaves, we're going to leave them nice and blank, okay? It's all going to be negative space. We're going to really only be laying in detail around the underside of these clumps of leaves. Now, why is that? Well, it's it's basically the same reason we approached this area in the way that we did. It's, it's going to save us time, obviously, because we're not going to need to lay in as much detail, but it's also going to produce more contrast, more three das, more clarity and readability within what it is we're seeing. So sort of breaking up these leaves into little clumps and, you know, as we get toward the bottom, yes, I'm adding more detail in. I'm breaking them up more and more. And I might add in some more branches as well, so we could have those coming in through there. That'll work good for us. That's what we want. Okay. And I'm lacking that. Next, we'll do the same thing over here. I treat leaves like hair in this way. It would be a bit of a hairstyle for the tree, I guess, when you think about it. Adding in those textures and we'll get this tree branch coming up over here. Get the eraser out. Get rid of some of those lines that we don't want necessarily. Another branch over here. There we go beautiful. And then, hey, why don't we add in some branches up there? That's good. Wonderful. Okay, there we go. And once again, get the eraser out, do the same thing up here. Look at that. That beautiful negative space. And look, we can blend some of these together if we feel that there's an option to do that. I'm liking what I'm seeing there. I think we're ready to render some of that out. So here's how that's going to look. We just start to get those cross hatches in there. And check out this trickery. Now, these lines I'm laying down. They're just uniform, fairly straight lines that run parallel to each other. And the way that I get the varying tones that we see throughout this tree is I simply Well, I'm going to undo that, by the way. I feel like they need to be finer. The way that I capture these is I just sort of stroke them in there, and I do it quick, okay? So I'm not trying to be too careful with them. I want to get a bit of a rhythm happening within my stroke as I work. And I guess I'm pulling toward the general direction that I want the leaves to move in as a whole. But sometimes I really just I place them in in a way I guess is going to just look good on the page. That's the other thing. I mean, you can follow all the rules in the book and still end up with something that looks terrible. You have to develop your artistic intuition a little bit as with anything. Now, here we're going to combine some of these hatches. Sometimes there's going to be moments where we break them up a little bit. So check this out. Like we can break some of these hatches off and run them up into the main clump of tree up here. Okay, see that. That's looking really nice. The thing is that with this tree, we're thinking about the overall shape and form that those leaves are coming together to create yet at the same time, we're also considering the smaller sub forms that we're able to make too. Now, notice how I change the distance between these hatches as we make our way down in the lower regions of this leafy hairdo that we got going on for our tree. We keep on adding in these hatches. At first, it doesn't look the best, but then as we keep on going here, as we continue to lay these hatches in slowly, but surely it all starts to come together. Before we know it, we're looking at something that looks pretty damn epic and it's hard to believe that we are the ones who are actually responsible for creating it. But that's just the thing every drawing is created. One line at a time, one line at a time. Even though sometimes it might not be obvious exactly how it's going to go, as long as you keep on working through it, you don't give up, you don't throw in the towel too early on, you will end up with something that looks pretty awesome, hopefully by the end. Okay. So we'll add these ones in up here. And you can see there's a certain amount of solidity now that we're seeing in this beautiful foliage that we've created for the tree. I mean, I guess the tree is foliage, isn't it? Let me come up here, maybe add in a few more hatches, just to complete the effect, if you will, and we'll add some hatches in here. There's no reason why you can't have some of these clumps of rendering run in different directions as far as the hatch hatching is concerned. You can see some darker leaves, some lighter leaves. But that'll just about do it for that side. Then over here, look, this is actually closer to the light on this side, we're going to be a little bit more careful, a little bit more picky with where we lay these hatches because we want this side to be more illuminated. And it's important to really consider this stuff to really think about, okay, where are the hatchets going to sit? And how are they going to describe this particular portion of the tree as a whole, Because look, if we mess this up, we're going to end up with something that isn't quite reading the way that it should. Okay. So we're gonna get some darker hatches happening around there. That's looking okay. You know, I don't want to overdo it on that side of the tree, so I'm probably gonna leave it as is. Look at that. Beautiful. We're getting pretty close actually to the look that we're after there for the tree. Now we'll jump over to these roots on this side and detail those out, describing their cylindrical form once again with the texturing and once that's done, we're going to get in there with the rendering. Like so. There we have it. Now, I'm not quite happy with that, so I'm going to go back in here and take another look. Wonderful. Sweet, that pretty much completes the tree, which is sort of like our center focus here for the entire environment. 6. Rendering the Foliage Covered Rock: Let's work on the other stuff around it. We're going to have this, I'm going to say a grassy rock mound in the foreground. I think that it'd be nice to maybe get some plants growing on it, potentially. Okay. So we'll have some, I guess, almost like what would you call these vines or weeds growing up the rock? I'm going to get rid of this perspective line for a moment just because it's distracting me. We generally know what perspective we're going for anyway, so we don't necessarily need that there anymore. But this would be like a cross between moss, I would say, and some shrubbery mixed with rock. So we're combining a few different things here with this foreground element. All right. And this will be another primary I guess, asset that we're including within the scene. So we're going to want to spend a little bit of time on this one. And then, you know, we're going to be able to get away with leaving these areas fairly sparse, I would say. We'll see how we do, but we do want to get through this fairly quickly. So I'm just going to start going in there, laying in the leaves. You can see that I'm getting real nice and scribbly with it. This is why I love natural environments as you can just I don't know, it's almost like therapeutic, I feel to be able to work on these sorts of environments as an artist because you get to let the pencil move on the page and let it loose a little bit. Let it go wherever it wants to go. Now we're going to have some grass and maybe some plants around the base of the rock there. Okay, so we'll get those in. That's gonna look nice and natural. Okay? We sort of got this road here that I'm thinking we're gonna leave that fairly bare, actually. You know, we might even get rid of it. Around that section and just have the rock here blend into the path that we're sort of suggesting that will ultimately be really only represented as negative space. All right. And yeah, you know, we could get some mushrooms in there. Let's get some mushrooms happening. I like mushrooms. Mushrooms are good to have in these more natural environments, so we'll get one in there. And let's see. Get another one in here. You know, mushrooms sort of they grow together, don't they? Grow another mushroom here, Frank Frazetta style mushrooms. That's what we're going for. All right. There we go. Beautiful. Get the eraser, get rid of all this background stuff that we've essentially overlapped with the mushrooms and get rid of that bit. Then we have it. Great. Now it's time to go in there and really begin laying in some more leaves on the dark side of the plantation, the moss that we see there growing up the rock. I call it shrubbery. Really, it doesn't really matter what you call it as long as you get to look right. Get some more here and we can even start adding in some rendering if we want to just to get a general feel for the plants that we want to go for and the way that it's going to read three dimensionally. Okay, there we go. Beautiful. I want to add in some more details there. You know when I see environments like this, especially those created by Frank Frazetta, I just get so inspired. I think the reason for that is it really does feel like you're being pulled into this completely other world, and that's always what I'm striving to achieve in the work that I create is I want to make it so that when the audience sees the illustrations that I'm presenting before them, I want them to feel like they can step right into it. And that's really a good motivation to have, as you can imagine, as an artist. Okay. Now remember, in these lighter areas, you don't need a whole lot of detail. The lighter an area is the less detail that's required. In fact, it would be bad. It would be a very bad thing to add more detail in these lighter sections because we would then lose the contrast. Unfortunately, we wouldn't have that nice readability there anymore and it'll lose its depth. It all blend into one flat thing that's definitely not what we want, right? If I was inking this out by the way, there'd be a heck of a lot more shadow that I'll be placing in, but because this is a sketch, we're really depending on the rendering here, first and foremost to get our depth happening. And our texture at the same time. We have a mushroom here. Let's get him drawn in. We'll see that mushroom is casting a shadow onto itself, as well. Creating a bit of a shadow. Do the same thing here. There we go. Done. All right, next, we're gonna get the eraser out and get rid of some of that line art. Once that's done, we'll draw in some of the rock texture that this moss is actually growing on. I want you to once again just try to be in the moment as you're drawing out your environments. Relax. Use it to relax and try to remember that it doesn't need to look any specific way as long as it somewhat represents the element that you're attempting to present on the page, you'll be okay, you'll be fine. Look at that. It's beautiful. It's looking real nice now. You can see that I've somewhat blended the grassy area into the rock area here. That blending is so wonderful. It works really well, actually. We'll get a little bit of grassiness happening over here and just notice all the leaves that we've created on this side. Now we can render those out. There we go. Those in? Boom. And notice the stair stepping look that we have there where we've got the negative white against the black. It just helps to separate those forms gorgeously. Okay, I'll get the eras route, get rid of some of that. And now, what are we going to use to then divide this grassy area off of the rock? Well, we're going to use the rock instead. Okay, so it's going to come down. And around. Okay. Look at that. Beautiful. And then, of course, we get some rendering in there for said rock. Now, the darker that rendering is, the more stark the division of value is going to be in that area, so just keep that in mind. But notice how the rock texture sort of stops at this grassy portion, and that's what's creating the division there. So it actually works really well. Now, we might still get some grassiness happening around the bottom here. If we wanted to get real fancy, we could even add in some more hatches on the rock itself. But that might be taking it to a whole other level of detail that we might regret if we've got to bring everything to that same level of density. So let's not go too overboard there with that. Now we have got some more rendering to place in up here, so we'll go ahead, add that in. In fact, we might have some of this mossiness occur around the top section, too. I'll undo that. Okay. Because, you know, that just wasn't balanced. So more isn't going to work out for us, unfortunately. Add some rendering around this area. That's looking fairly good. That's working for us, I think. Okay. And hmm. You know what? I think that this rock area is actually looking pretty good. I don't think we need to add much more to that, you know? We don't want to overdo it, like I said. And we already have sort of done that, I would say, by adding in that rendering here. So I'm going to take that out. I go to get rid of that. Like so. Cool. 7. Sketching Foreground and Background Elements: Okay, next, we're going to sort of do a little bit of a dodgy here. All right. We're going to keep this area around the bottom fairly sparse, in fact. So let's see. We can add, let's say, well, let's add some plants and mushrooms in here. Now, I'm going to be kind of making this up. I'm not a professional or an expert when it comes to mushrooms. So we'll just add a few in here and we're going to use those to take up this area. Sort of, you know, following in the footsteps of Frank Frazetta there. Alright, the stalks, the mushrooms will go right here, and heck, we might even add another one right around the top. Beautiful. So now we have a stack of mushrooms going on. And then as for this road here that we're creating, I think that one thing that we could add in is is a falling down tree a log maybe that's running along this area. Heck, it could be connected, in fact, to this tree up here. I don't know, maybe. That's a little bit of a straight route though. Why don't we bring that down here and around to over there? How about that? There we go. Could that work? Maybe. It might be going a little bit too straight there, so let's have it run on more of an angle into the foreground. Wonderful. Take another drink coffee here. You know, coffee is an important thing to have as an artist. Although I should probably, I always say it. I got to give up coffee. It's not a good thing to be drinking it as much as I do, but you know, I went out the other day. I went to the coffee stall and I said, Hey, can you give me a large coffee? But with one shot of coffee and three sugars? Thank you. And the coffee shop dude, he just It's like he couldn't believe the order. It's like it was I was a sinful order to make at a coffee shop. Probably because, you know, it's there's barely any coffee in it, and there's much more sugar. But what can I do? You know? That's what I love. That's what I enjoy. I like the heater caffeine, but I like the taste of sugar. I try to get the best of both worlds when I go out for a coffee because oftentimes I find that the coffee at coffee shops is just way too strong for me, you know, puts way too many hairs on my chest. So I try to tame it down a little bit. All right. We've got the makings of some mushrooms over here. Keep in mind, try to remember that this is how it starts. This is how anything you add into your scene is going to begin is basic blobs. I've got a bit of an outline and that's all we really need to progress the artwork forward after that. What we're going to do over here Okay, round this section is we're going to start from the top, and we're sort of going to run some detail down into this region where the tree is. Alright. But at the bottom, guess what? We're going to leave that fairly sparse. Yeah, we're going to create a call it like a fog, sort of a fog effect. We can do the same thing over here, actually. You know, let's get rid of some of that detail, and we'll just let it run into nothingness at the bottom. And for some reason, that just looks good, especially when we're talking about natural environments. Over here, we're going to pretend like this is a really grassy area up here. We could create some bushes. So weedy areas. But, you know, I don't want to just make everything rocks and cliffs here. We'll save that for another lesson on how to draw rocky environments. For this one, we want to really lean into the plants. Lean into the more the greenery that you'd see in a really dense forest environment. Okay, and there we go. That's looking pretty good. Have that grass running to the roots there. And then, you know, I'm just plotting out how the rest of this scene is actually going to play out. All right? We're going to erase this area. Okay. Like so. And then, you know, over here, we'll probably have some more grass. You know, we'll have that rundown over there. Like so. That's done. And just look at this. This is looking really nice. It's coming together beautifully. And we'll also, of course, you know, we want trees, right? We want a lot of trees in a forest environment, so we're going to add more of those over here. You know, just sort of occupying this area of the backdrop. Do some erasing there. Okay, you can see those tree trunks that we've got going on. All right. Now again, you're looking at this, and you're like, What the heck? This is so abstract right now. How does Clay bring it all together in the end? Look, I ain't no magician, all right? I'm just here following through the process, the workflow of how I like to tackle this stuff. Notice that I never start out with anything detailed. I always this is called blocking things out, right? I block it out first and then I move along with it. That's exactly what's happening here. I'm just blocking it out and crossing my fingers that it all works out in the end. But the wonderful thing about this particular approach is that there's no excuses. You start blocking it out. You just start laying down anything. It could be any basic, weird looking shape. You just get to work and build on top of that. You build on top of it. Check this out. We can really pull a Frank frisa of here and just add in some roots running around the root. That we've got here. Okay, there we go. Look at that. Beautiful. 8. Rendering the Foreground Elements: Now it's a simple matter of just going in there and adding in those textures. Like so. As you can see, it's actually fairly easy as long as you're trying to keep in mind that you're working over the top of a cylindrical form, it's probably going to work out just fine in the end. Okay, now later on, we'll want to define, of course, this area with maybe a more starker primary contour. But for now, this is just where we want. Try to, I guess, keep your hand loose as you're working, whether you're using a stylus or a pencil. And don't be afraid to, you know, explore various shapes and directions for the line to follow. You never know where it could lead. Like I said, you're dealing with very organic shapes here, especially for the textures. You know, drawing in the wrinkles around the roots, just reminds me of it's almost like drawing wrinkles around a really um, wrinkled hand, you know, the knuckles of a finger. That's what I'm thinking about right now. And really, I guess, the roots and the branches are the fingers of the tree. Aren't they? Okay, there we go. So we've got those in there. And now we're just going to really incorporate the rendering. So we can come in around here and keep in mind that we are going to be seeing this root somewhat blend into the ground. So we need to consider that as we work. All right. So it's not going to be a clean cut off of the ground that this root is running along. It's important to keep that in mind. And notice how almost immediately we get this really nice looking three dimensiality start to come about. You might be seeing more Clayton. You know, this is the left hand side of the tree root, and, you know, that's the side that the light is coming through on. And you would be correct. But the thing is that we're lower to the ground here, and we're looking at the bottom of that root. So there will be a little bit of rendering that we see around that area. And not to mention the fact that this is quite close to us now this tree root. So we are going to see a little bit more detail occur throughout it. All right. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that we don't want to make this too smooth looking, right? Like, it's still supposed to be a rough looking root. So we might want to break up this rendering a little bit from time to time. Alright. That's looking good. We probably don't need more than that, if I'm being quite honest with you. We can even go in with your eraser there. We can get rid of some of that rendering if we want the leaves and the grass to come up into the root and around it. All right. So next, we've got our mushrooms here in the foreground. Let's draw those out. We don't need too much going on with them. Ultimately, a lot of the rendering that we see on those mushrooms is going to come from the drop shadows that'll be projected down onto the stalk. Alright, look at that. Just some very light rendering there. Now, if you look at Frazetta mushrooms, I mean, they're certainly not that detailed. They don't have that much rendering applied to them. So this is all a personal preference of mine. And we could even have a few little dots placed on these mushrooms. Just to show they're the ones that you shouldn't eat. Okay. And then we'll jump over to the other mushroom over here. So this one, we could even say that, Hey, maybe this mushroom in front is projecting a drop shadow onto it, would be pretty cool just to create depth. Drop shadows are lovely. They're wonderful when it comes to suggesting depth within anything that you draw. And just like before, we're going to take this mushroom here and we're going to add in some very subtle rendering. Like so. Look at that. Isn't that gorgeous. Just some very light, fine lined rendering. That's all we need there, and you can see that it describes the form absolutely beautifully. And if you feel like, you know, this mushroom over here in the front, maybe it needs a little bit more focus brought into it. We just add in those darker tones, and that'll certainly do the trick in that regard. Now look at that. We can turn up the rendering at any point. And really get the focus in on that mushroom. Okay. And then we got another one over here. So let's check this one out. We'll add in a drop shadow onto it, too, breaking up these mushrooms and they're layering against one another. See that? Beautiful. Get the eraser out. There we have it. And now, once again, we'll go ahead and we'll lay in that rendering. Another mushroom down. One more to go. And, hey, why don't we add some spots to this one, too? Jump over to this one, off to the side. There's a nice, big, mushy get the eraser out, get rid of that little bit. And, you know, as I'm laying in the rendering around the top of this mushroom, notice the direction that the hatches are going in. I'm trying to make it so that I'm describing the form as I work. Okay. It's a rounded form, for sure. We're describing the top of that mushroom. I think that is describing it pretty well. It's running along the curve there. You can see I'm adding a little sort of ridge at the base of the mushroom top. There we go. I'm thinking about a band that I used to like back in the day right now called mushroom Ed. Alright, now, once that's done, we'll add another drop Shoda in under this one. And there's a little cluster of mushrooms will be completed. There we have it. Mission accomplished with the mushrooms. You can add in some textures around this root. For the root. Okay. 9. Rendering the Background Elements: So we're going to get a little bit of rendering potentially up here, but not too much. Okay? Remember that we don't want to render everything out here. If we render everything out, it's just going to lose its effect. It's not going to it's going to flatten everything out. So we want maybe some suggestions here and there of some rendering. But ultimately, that's probably even too much there. So we're just going to leave it at that and that'll work absolutely fine, we could potentially come over here and Maybe add in some other grass. Okay. And that could work. All right, there we go. Notice how I'm pulling that rendering back away from the mushrooms. I don't want it moving into them too much. We're going to get some nice separation there. Get rid of this area, this area. As we move toward the tree here in this section, we can start to increase that rendering once again. Actually, let's undo. Okay. Okay, beautiful. That's looking good. And now, over here where we see these other trees, are we going to add some rendering to their tree trunks? Like so, and we might even come up here, add some branches. Well, you know what? I think that's going to be too distracting. So let's just leave them as silhouettes that are somewhat blank and not filled in. Look, what I'm going to do around the top here is I'm going to add in a more defined line for this section. And with these trees over here, we can add a little bit more detail just to break up some of the leaves and to show that it's a semi it's at least as finished as the rest of the drawing. And sure, we could add in some, like, drop shadows potentially onto the tree trunks. That the tops of these leaves sitting on these leafy heads. You can see that added detail it brings those trees in the background to focus. Makes them look a little more done. You're thinking Clayton, how would you ink this out? Well, we could certainly talk about that in another lesson. It's a bit outside the scope of this one just because of time wise, but it wouldn't be dissimilar to this. Like I said, I would probably add in a few more shadows, especially just pure black shadows into the leaves and whatnot. But for the most part, I'd still very much take the exact same approach. You know, I mean, this is definitely something that you could give an Inca, and they would go in there and they would go to town on it, basically. But I think it's important to understand that you don't need to define every single thing within the scene to have something that looks really, really nice. You know, you can see here that a lot of the trees and whatnot, especially the ground, like, isn't it funny how the ground it kind of looks done. It looks like there is a forest floor there. It's just that, you know, we've been very smart in the way that we've approached. All right. We haven't needed to necessarily go in there and detail every single aspect of it out. And then in the far backdrop, we could just potentially add some sort of additional forestry, you know, this could be trees way off into the distance here. Now, we definitely don't want to add too much detail to that. Why? Well, ultimately, that's going to bring it forward if we add any more detail. We'll define these little bits of plant shrubbery over here, a tiny bit more and that'll be enough to complete that background portion, essentially. 10. Adding the Finishing Touches: All right. Now, what else? Let's take a look here. Maybe there's something more we can add in potentially. All right. Just think about the foreground elements. These mushrooms are really wonderful foreground element that we've got in there. We've also got this rock here as well, and by the way, once you're done, once you're happy with what you've got there on the page, go back over the top of some of the key elements like I'm doing here with a tree and just embolden the outline, define it with more clarity because it can start out pretty rough and it's important to tighten things up as you move along and develop the drawing. So here with this root that's coming into the foreground, yeah, we want to get our pencil in there and outline it properly, like so. Okay. There we go. Done. It's just leading into this little patch of grass here. Alright. I think that might be looking pretty darn good, honestly. I mean, we could add in little bits of texture detail, but again, I think that's going to be potentially even overdoing it. Maybe you could have a different plant species in the foreground there, just coming up into this section. Maybe there's a weed here or something growing in the grass. Okay, so we could add that in. That'll work. Look at that. That's beautiful. There we go. Done. It's just a little bit more detail that we can add in there and heck we could do the same thing here, add in a bit more of a plant or another plant species in this region. Coming off of the rock. You know, you look at the scene overall and you feel it out. You think, what could I add here? What more do we need to really make this complete? And I'm thinking that we're basically done. I think that looks really good for something that took us maybe an hour or so to draw, you know, maybe an hour and a half. So the main things to keep in mind, at the end of the day, you just start out loose, stay out big, have fun with it. Explore, see what potential directions you could go in. And if you just continue to stick with it and develop it, you will be okay. You'll end up with something that looks pretty darn good in the end. Let me just get rid of that a little bit. Cool. There we go. That's lovely. 11. Outro: And that wraps up our lesson on drawing forest environments. I hope that you got a heck of a lot of value out of that one and that you had some fun with it, that you created something that looks cool and interesting and maybe even potentially could serve as a set for whatever comic book project it is that you're working on right now. You know, there's some really interesting aspects to environment design that we can really hone in on, particularly in regards to what we learned from this demonstration, which is just to start out, Mercy, start out rough, get those basic abstract looking shapes down onto the page. And as you saw, we can kind of turn them into anything as long as you just, you know, you think about the general forms that you want to go with, the composition really is one of the most important aspects to consider. Have that focal point. Think about the rule of thirds as you're placing down the primary assets that you're going to include within the environment. Consider the foreground, middle ground and background elements, and by the end, you should have something that has depth to it that looks three dimensional, looks like a world that you could walk straight into a world that's living and vibrant. Also, on top of that, the other big takeaway is to find artists who have done the thing that you're trying to do already. In this case, it was drawing foresty environments. So find some artists whom you admire, whose style you sort of want to lean toward with your own and get some examples of their workup of those specific things that you want to draw, and that will serve as a compass for you a guide to direct how you approach your own forest environments. Please do try to implement some of what we talked about here in the lesson. Create your own forest environments and be sure to post them up. I'd love to see them until next time, keep on drawing, keep on creating, and I'll see you again real soon. Bye bye for now.