Behind-the-scenes on "all this and heaven too"

So in the wake of the disappointment of last environment speedpaint, I was far from finished with environment speedpaints.  If anything, I was more fueled and excited than ever to give it another go and improve my digital speedpainting.  And my latest speedpaint, "all this and heaven too," definitely shows a lot of encouraging improvement!  (The title comes from a song of the same name by Florence + the Machine.  <3)

This is going to be a short step-by-step process blog of "all this and heaven too."  I saved a few files along the way, so you can see a bit of how the final came to be.  (Next time, I'll save more pics along the way.  ^_~)  I also used this opportunity to become more comfortable with some of the brushes I have saved onto my computer, which was a lot of fun!

Before I begin, I'd like to state that I did use a reference for this picture.  I believe I got the reference from a friend's Facebook photo album I was flipping through.  Unfortunately, I was really stupid and forgot to write down whose album it was (it wasn't an artist friend; just a random friend).  If I ever figure out whose picture it was, I will, of course, credit them.

Check it out after the break!  :)


First step: Base  colors/layout

First, I did a very basic color scheme and layout, just to get an idea of the basic set-up.  I was really inspired to do more speedpaints from an awesome speedpainting tutorial I found on deviantART.  One of the suggestions in the tutorial was, instead of taking colors directly from a photo, to eye them yourself (because photo colors are typically warped and it's good practice).  So that's what I did.  This was all on one layer; I just kept it visible (until towards the very end) and painted over top.

Second step: The sky

Next I painted the sky.  One thing that I always struggle with is making things glow, for some reason.  The sun was really bright, yellow, and a bit pink in the picture, and I really wanted to capture that in the painting.  The sky was also a very interesting mix of colors--some blue, but much more brown colors and even some greens.  This is far from the final sky, but when I got to this point I moved on.

Step three: Background mountains

Next I moved onto the mountains in the background and along the sides.  As I did this, I also fixed the horizon of the sky (and tweaked the sun and sky colors a bit).  The photo that I had was really interesting--to be quite honest, I couldn't always tell when I was looking at mountains and when I was looking at mist.  The colors were just so strange.  It took a lot of tweaking to get the right colors that looked natural and complementary.  At this point, I had pretty much completely painted over the sketch layer from the first step.

Step four: Basic coloring finished

I kind of wished I had saved a picture a little before this; apologies for the big jump.  There are very little changes in the sky in this picture; just some sunbeams added to the sun.  At this point, I finished the mountains/mist (for the most part) and added the plants in the foreground.  It was almost tempting to stop at this step; basically everything was done.  I still wasn't completely pleased, however.  The sky still seemed really flat; it didn't have the depth from the photo, or the "warmth" of the brown tones.  The picture simply didn't feel polished at this point.

Step five: Finishing touches and final product

Finally, finally I was able to get the sky colors the way I wanted.  I kind of had to go against my instinct to put in those brown tones, but it was really what the picture needed.  It gives a very strange warm-cool balance between the browns/reds and the greens/blues.  I also fixed the plants a bit to fit the palette of the picture and made the sun smaller and more shapely.  At one point very near the end, I was almost done but was displeased with the roughness of the picture.  It was kind of like a painter seeing her strokes; it still looked unpolished.  So I smoothed out the colors in the sky and the mountains a bit.  My signature in the corner and I was done!  :)

Total time: About 2.5 hours

So, there you go, the process behind "all this and heaven too."  I hope you found it interesting!  It's always amazing to look from the first step to the final product.  One of the things about speedpainting is that it's always hard to know when to stop.  I could easily have kept tweaking the colors and such, but I had to make a decision when I thought it was finally finished, and it wasn't easy!  I'm definitely planning on doing more of these speedpaints; they're TONS of fun and are really great experience for digital painting!  So here's to more speedpaints!