In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a medieval landscape using digital painting and photo manipulation techniques. We will begin by sketching out a rough idea of how we want our image to look. Then, we will then add various stock images and build upon them until we produce the scene below. Let’s get started!

Before You Begin

This piece has been done with the help of a graphic tablet, to be precise a Wacom Bamboo Fun. If you’re painting with a mouse, the technique is always the same. Only thing that changes is the time you’ll spend on it. In order to get a good effect, remember to vary often opacity and flow jitter.

Step 1 – Sketch on paper

Like many of my pieces, this has been drawn away from my computer with a blue pen and a piece of paper. When I made this, before starting drawing, I already had a precise idea of what I wanted. The cave here works like a frame and everything in it it’s the actual piece. I wanted to focus the viewer into only a few elements and I wanted it to have a strong impact, which is why I choose as central element the sun.

Step 2 – In Photoshop

First thing I did after scanning the piece and importing it into Photoshop was to create that frame. To do it, you can use different Photoshop tools. You can use the Brush Tool (B), the Lasso Tool (L), the Pen Tool (P), and probably a couple more. It doesn’t matter which one you’re going to use, just try to create an interesting shape and try to make it precise, without having soft edges (in this case, Pen Tool is the most accurate, but it’s also an hard tool to manage, if you’re not confident with it, my advice is to spend time trying to understand how it works, it is really an amazing tool once you get how it works. Hundreds of tutorial has been written about how to master it. Learn the shortcuts, they’ll save you a lot of time. It might be a pain at first, but when you’ll know how to use it at his best, you’ll be grateful to have learned something so useful).

Step 3 – Choosing a color palette

A thing that I think is very important is choosing a color palette before you start looking for stocks. This way you can get already an idea of what is that you’re going to look for. It’s a way to know which kind of photo do you need (in this case, which kind of sky) and you can directly look for that. In this case I limited myself into painting with a soft brush a very simple sunset. In this step I also created, on a different layer, the ground of the cave using the Lasso Tool, which is the best tool when painting to create the sharp shapes of the rocks.

Step 4 – Hills

Ok, Hills! Very simple to make: I divided them into layers. First layer is for the furthest ones, made them just using the hard round brush and a desaturated green.

On the second layer, which is going to be on top of the first layer, we will paint a closer hill using again the same brush, this time with a more orangish green.

Here I’ve added the first castle. It’s a simple photo rendered using the Pen Tool.

In order to blend the castle, I created a new layer and a clipping mask with a brown/orange layer set on lighten. This way the darkest colors of the castle will become like the colors in the clipped layer. In this step I also texturized the hills using brush number 5 of the brush set. Grass has many colors and based on the lights and shadows these colors become even more, so for giving it a nice effect try to use more than a couple of them. As you can see, other than the green, I used different tones of brown, orange and yellow. (editor：admin)