Painting a Digital Background

More pictures than words in this post! I've been implementing backgrounds!! SHOCKER :O

It's really changed how I perceive my art. Instead of my characters populating the void, they now inhabit the local ice-cream shop, the kids' park, and the calling office in town.

Rural backgrounds, or, more accurately- LEAVES- are difficult for me. So I've been focusing on nature in my backgrounds.

For this piece I was very careful to separate my layers, and each layer of bush was first made with a huge blob, and then I'd add on 'leaf' definition (the circly spirals), and then the lights and darks and even More detail on another layer.

I had a vision for this forest path, but I also had google images. At the end of this post, I'll include the image that helped me place my path and trees.

Again, I started with messy, big blobs. and I just added blobs on top of that. Each new level of detail got a new layer, and the trees had a set of three layers all to themselves.

You can see how I used heavy detail and dark colors in the front, or "Foreground", and all of the trees in the back are considerably lighter to help with the illusion of depth.

The leaves added extra interest! I tried to put light greens right next to the dark ones so that all the green wouldn't just blend together.

The warm look of this last picture was created by a topmost layer filled in with a bright orange with the opacity lowered until it looked how I wanted: Sunlight filtering through the trees.

As promised, here's the google image! It doesn't look anything like the finished result, but it really helped me with the placement of the trees and the shadows on the path. USE REFERENCES !!!