Lollipop trees (Photoshop CS6) inspired by Illustration Friday

Nov 13, 2012

Tasha ⋅ CS6, Gouache, Illustration Friday, Photoshop, Tree ⋅ gouache, Illustration Friday, Photoshop CS6, tree ⋅ 1 comment

I was very excited to see ‘tree’ as the Illustration Friday topic this week, as I have always loved drawing trees. I’m cheating this week and I have three trees (so far), including the tree I wrote about the other day. (I wonder if I should add the gouache trees I did the other day, too?)

For this one, I did another gouache tree. I used a One Stroke #3/8 for the green body of the tree, a Filbert #1/4 for the trunk and branches, an Angle #1/8 for the leaves and a Round #1 for the detail on the leaves and trunk.

I kind of liked it, though I felt that the shape came across a little odd on its own.

So I thought I would have a play with it in Photoshop and give it some friends and some background.

I wanted to have an almost 3D effect, to look like a glued collage picture. I started with a textured green background.

And then I added some textured stripes.

I then added the Lollipop tree to it.

Then I made some individual trees of two different size and coloured them up differently.

 

Placing them on the canvas in different positions.

And then I added paper-like texture to all the tree layers, a grey stroke (25 points for the Lollipop tree and 5 pointes for the others) with a dissolve blend mode and then a drop shadow.

OK, so, there was a lot more fiddling and tweaking than that and I changed the position of the trees a lot before settling on this arrangement. I find the trees odd shape works better when it’s repeated.

I have a feeling there should be a fox jumping about among the trees. And possibly a girl sitting in one of the trees, reading a book.

 

If you’re into trees, I’ve made a Trees Pinterest board, where I’m pinning nice tree art I see, as well as my own tree pictures. Oh and I also have a Behance Trees Project, too.