May 27th 2008
Old Bent Tree-Work In Progress (WIP)
*Someone* suggested to me that I post a Work-In-Progress of my Old Bent Tree illustration. So, here we are… 
Keep in mind that I am always refining my own processes, so this is merely *one* way to do things. Also, for an ideal WIP series, there would probably be at least one step between the line drawing and this.
On this particular illustration, I am working solely in Photoshop CS3. At this stage, I have scanned in my line drawing, and done minimal cleanup on it. I may clean up the line in a much later stage, especially where the scan wasn’t the best. The line drawing is on a top layer in this case set to Multiply ( I am liking the quality of the line drawing in this case, so I am planning on keeping it rather than painting over it).
I picked a nice earthy tone for the background to start with and have painted in flat areas of color where I think I will be working in varying detail (this can always change). I am a bit of a layer fiend so I tend to keep these areas in separate layers at first. As I build the color and detail I will combine layers and work them together.
Because I was itching to develop the old tree guy (and to convince Diane I had something specific in mind for the color version), I have been developing the bark and ground texture detail. I have been doing all the bark by hand with a chalk brush in PS building the various layers of color. For the ground debris, I created a PS brush that looked like some dead leaves, sticks n such and varied the layers of color and size. I will be developing this more.
I am ready to start messing with the background now (I may mess with the rocks in front a bit too).
I’ll post the next steps as I go…
