Jungle Background
This is not as much a tutorial as just a snapshot of one way I have learned to color. By no means is it a set standard or anything because I am not near good enough to set a standard, its more of just one technique that can be implemented if you so wish. With that in mind it if you wish to reproduce this you must have moderate knowledge of Photoshop although I am fairly sure it could be done in any number of paint programs.

 

Ok well here is part II. I will write more when i get some extra time. ^_^

As always get your line art all cleaned up and ready to paint.

At this point I just think of what kind of color I want in the piece and begin to randomly paint around the scene. I had to use some reference photos for color here since I wasn't sure how mist would affect the trees far into the background. You can pretty much tell I just ran around haphazardly coloring as I went.

Here I decided to lay in a gradient to represent the mist in the background to give me some color to work off.


I finished laying in most of the flat colors and experimented a little with some shadow on the trees in the back and the rocks.


At this point I just paint all over the place. Here you can see I started mostly with the rocks. A lot of the time spent here is just figuring the colors (for me anyway.)

More of the rocks laid in and some of the foreground trees


You can see the rocks beginning to develop more and more at this point. The brush I used was a dual brush mixture with a dark green in the foreground and a really bright green in the background I would just paint, blend and dot the tablet pen around till I was happy.

The development of the trees is quite easy to see here along with the coloration in the bushes all around.


ok while this might look like a massively drastic change from the last picture it really isn't. It was all almost just one layer of the fog. Then i laid in some really quick brushstrokes to look like tree trunks in the background. very simple but effective I think. Also make sure you mask out the foreground trees so they have no to very little mist in front of them.

And viola here it is. The soldier is standing out a bit more than I would like but it could be easily remedied by changing the greens to a color closer to the background green. I haven't done this because I lost the original photoshop file.. Anywho good luck and if you need any help drop me a line.