From Thought To Imagery (Part 3)

Part 1 Bringing the World To Life (continued...)

So, now on to day two of my progress with this image... I've only stepped away from it for the night and the length of my work day, and my mind has been jumping with ideas of ways to better bring the world to life... so lets continue...

The next couple steps I did was place a few more outlines of trees closer to the front, then like in the previous post, I added some lighter and darker colors to give these new trees depth. I like to do a lot of tree layering when it comes to forest scenes to add an almost endless depth of trees.



After that, I add a bit of plant life and what not behind the new trees to fill up some of that empty space. To do this, I like to start by adding dark colors to create where plants will take shape



Then I add a bit of green highlights over the dark areas to start the plant life...



Something a little more time consuming is to go back into the highlighted green areas to create the plant details...



Then I add some plant life growing up the side of the tree to give it a more overgrown effect...



After satisfied with the way that looks, I decide to draw the shape of a stump... This is for our Timeless Prisoner to sit upon.



One of the saddest things about these sorts of paintings is with all these layers and what not, some of the work put into the image will never be seen because there is a tree or a bush or people blocking some of things you put work into... but I guess as the artist it is just satisfying knowing that they are there... this is also the reason I like to have another version of the painting without the people within them... just the setting... otherwise the work I put into this stump would be entirely purposeless.



Now that I've added some detail to the stump, its time to start building up the world around it... the stump, at this point serves as a marker for the subject of the painting... I like to then add a bunch of little plants and flowers and that kind of thing, and set up the ground...



And there you have it, a few hand cramps later and Part 1 "Bringing the World to Life" is complete with a little forest scene...

I am one who is really sort of all for "The Big Reveal" and by doing this step by step process it sort of takes some of the power away from the unveiling of the finished piece... so I've decided that what I am going to do is not post the step by step process of the rest of this painting until after I've finished it. Then you can see the finished piece and see the steps I took to get from here to there.