Digg It | del.icio.us | Reddit

This tutorial was written by Patrick Keith.

This step-by-step guideline is in no way the definitive process to create great landscapes with your digital software but is really an overview of one working method that has proven itself in the many pieces I have completed using it. The weapon of choice, for me, is Mac hardware running Photoshop with a Wacom graphics tablet. You can use pretty much anything you have at hand, since I will be describing painting techniques that are not really platform or software dependent. Corel/Procreate Painter is excellent software for this type of work and should be considered for serious digital painting. I was not as familiar with Painter as Photoshop at the time of creating the tutorial, so all of my examples are from Photoshop.

The commission shown in the examples was described to be a scene with Skyships, ruins and a waterfall. The rest of it I had pretty much free-reign on. It was to be printed on the outside of a Game Master’s screen for a role playing game and would be 11″x17″. I decided to do the full image at 12″x18″ to give a little extra trimming room. The image was setup in Photoshop 5 at 300 dpi in CMYK mode since the file was going to be color-separated at the printer. A lot of times there is a visible color shift converting RGB files to CMYK, so I normally work in that mode.

The original sketch was done at 4″x5″ and sent via email to the art director for approval. You can see that it is just general broad brush strokes to give the impression of the whole image. Once the approval was given for the sketch I enlarged the image to the final size of the painting to act as a guide.

For this image, I wanted to do it at least the original size it was going to be printed which is 11″ x17″. I added the extra inch to each side to give the printer a little leeway in cropping the image. Most of the time, you’ll want to work larger than the final output. Enlarging digital images tends to pixellate them so I try to work in actual size or bigger. For card art, I work at four times the final print size because it’s easier to navigate around the image

All of the painting was done using the airbrush tool in various sizes with an edge sharpness of 100% and spacing set to 1. I also set the opacity in the Brush Options between 10 and 15.