Draw the scenery

The text is now finished. Let’s add the trees and foliage.
This technique I’m about to show you is what I have developed for myself. It reduces complex imagery to simple shape. A simple splatter, when grouped in a pattern begins to take a certain role, thus resembling an element of nature. You may find it useful or dull, but it’s what we’ll use for this design.

All you need is a standard Photoshop round brush and a mouse. Choose one using your Brush Tool (B) and input the settings found in the images below.

Now that your brush settings are all ready, begin painting a tree. It’s important to know that you shouldn’t create the whole tree with the same brush settings. There is one adjustment you need to make along the way. If you look under Shape Dynamics in your Brushes Window, you’ll see a setting we’re using: Fade. This fades out your brush depending on how much you put in the adjacent field. A Fade set at 100 will end faster than one set at 250. You can use whatever settings you find appropriate. I used 100 for the trunk, 150 for extensions of the trunk, and 250 for thick branches. As you increase the fade, reduce the brush size at the same time.

Continue using this technique in creating the rest of the trees and draw some roots too. Reduce the size considerably for the thin branches and add even more fading when necessary.

It’s time for foliage. Prepare a separate brush using these settings.

Now begin painting. Begin with a larger size using this green: 94aa53. In a layer underneath, with a smaller sized brush, paint with a darker green: 55612f. Again over the light green layer, use the same color (94aa53) with an even smaller size. For highlights, use the same size as the last one, but with this yellow: e3e07d. Here is an image you can use as a reference in creating your own trees.

I drew my inspiration from acacia trees, while coming up with the shape of the trunk and volume of the foliage.

Following the branches as a reference, draw away!

Add more nature elements now. I added a mountain and a moon. They will give depth to the image, and prevent the composition from being scarce. Use the pen tool (P) and create them as vector shapes.

Make the mountain fade out on the bottom. An easy way to do it would be to create a new layer on top, clip it to the mountain layer and paint with a large soft brush with the background color. I also added a glow on the moon. To add one yourself, add a layer style: Outer Glow. Keep the standard color, increase its size and reduce the opacity to 25%.

Some more improvements include adding dark accents to the lower part of the tree trunks and shadows that stretch across the face of the letters. You can create those in the same way – clip a new layer to the one you want darkened and paint with a soft brush using a dark color. This applies to the mountain, trees and roots. Use a sharp brush to draw the tree shadow though.

Finalize the design

In order to complete the artistic feel of this design, add this texture to your canvas. Simply paste it on a new layer, over all the other ones. Set the layer’s blending mode to Linear Burn and its opacity to 30%.

Now invert the texture (Ctrl+I) and change its hue by going to Image > Adjustments > Hue and Saturation. Change the hue to 153 and saturation to -73.

One last touch – add the watercolor texture inside the mountain and moon, once more, with clipping masks. Put their layers on Overlay (Mountain) and Multiply (Moon). Adjust the opacity.

And that concludes it. Now go on and create your own, one of a kind, dream design.