Day 10: Leaf it Alone

Welcome to day 10 of Thingadailies. Want to play along? The full video is here.

Today's starting point: 10:38

Ending point: 12:12

Today was definitely a low effort attempt. (I spent two hours bathing the foster cat and then bleaching the bathroom, so I'm tired.) But for all that I can see the differences between what I did and how the tutorial went thought it, I don't think my attempt is that terrible.

Anyhow, we started here:

Step 1: Add the foliage

Again, the foliage image had already been extracted from the background, which is good. Otherwise, I never would have managed. So after the image is opened, we make three (four?) copies of it and place it around the tree, like so:

If you go back to the video, you'll see mine isn't quite the same as his, but whatever.

Photoshop has a way to create a group out of multiple layers and then use layer masks on the group, but GIMP doesn't support that. (Take that with a grain of salt. It turns out I have almost no idea what I'm doing, so this could very well be possible.) Anyhow, I merged all my foliage layers together. So there.

Step 2: Darken the foliage, except where you make it lighter

Levels! I missed him making a highlights layer, but I did one so it would sort of match.

Step 3: Highlight the edge of the trunk where the light is hitting it.

I did this, but I couldn't get it to look the same as it did in the video. His ability to freehand is much better than mine. Meh. Sure, it's fine.

Step 4: Add a darker trunk shadow.

Weirdly, he seems to just airbrush this in using black paint. All this time we've been adding a shadows layer and masking and so on and this time he just painted it? (Unless I missed something...) Anyhow, I did the thing.

So here's where we are at the end of day 10. Tomorrow, we add a bridge!