I'm breaking all my rules now

Maybe it's cause I feel guilty about not updating the blog like I should. Maybe it's cause I'm lonely and typing makes me feel like I'm communicating. Maybe I just want to show off.

Whatever the reason, I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm giving a preview of my work! That's right, an early-development sneak peek of what I'm working on. Oh, and if my words are mixed up, it's because I'm tired; in the last sentence alone, I originally typed "peak" instead of "peek" and "looking" instead of "working." If anything sneaks through, just ignore it.

PS Not just one preview, either. I'll continue to post new bits of it whenever I work on it.

Anyway, this painting is a very special landscape. For years, I've always said that I wished I could paint so I could paint the inside of my mind. The Fifth Plane, or creative plane, of my mind, to be exact. I want to use art to create a window so other people can share in my madness :D

My goal is to finish it by my 21st b-day in January so I can get it printed on a big canvas and hung in my room.

Without further ado, here is the first element of the painting which took me all afternoon:

Click for full!

It's a tree. And it's watermarked so don't even try to steal it >:O

It's still unfinished, but I'm happy with it for now. I need to add more leaves and leaf layers so it won't look so sparse, but that's all easy stuff. The main thing was the trunk. I tend to make them a bit too smooth, so I spent awhile applying textures.

At first, I tried to make it too difficult by using hard/soft/linear light like all the tutorials said, but in the end, my Adonihs 400 pt Shattered brush at 60-ish% opacity with a Gaussian blur 3 pt filter worked just as well. That makes me sound smart doesn't it? Well, don't get your hopes up. I haven't heard what the pros have to say yet.

The tree was based off a stock photo I found while searching for "ancient English oak" or something like that, but it's not a carbon copy. I like how it's a little lopsided.

I'll probably add two or three small jack-o-lantern lights in the branches, but I don't want it to look too much like a Halloween picture.

So that's it for now! Hopefully, I'll keep plowing forward with this because I'm actually having fun :D