Graal Forums - Tree top Tutorial

I've made plenty of trees in plenty of different styles over the years. Some good, most not... Anyways, over the years I have tried many things and today I thought I'd try to do a tree a little differently, but still familiar to myself. I thought, however, that I'd share this in a step-by-step tutorial for anyone else who wants to try. I guess I should also mention this isn't a full tree tutorial... I'll just be doing the leaves. Perhaps I'll finish the trunk later.

I will say, while this is a very easy method, it is NOT very fast. If you can't hack the effort and time, don't try. This can consume hours, depending on how determined and fast you work. So yes, it will take more patience than skill. It may also take some degree of knowledge of lighting and form... but I will try my best to explain each step to the point you may not need said knowledge, but will in fact learn it.

The gist of this is to create a large, blank blob, and fill it in. Instead of drawing each leaf individually by starting from the midshade and filling in the highlights and shadows, you will start from the 'end'. You will create a dark 'blob' and fill in the leaves. I think this gives a much better foresight of what you're doing, and where you're heading. So here we go...

Here's the progress animation:
http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/943...torial1yi8.gif
And here's the tutorial!

Step 1: Create the blob.
Most of this whole tutorial is done using a 2x brush(2x2 pixel square). I start by creating a very rough shape, and try to keep it 'natural'. I do this by remembering that all the leaves stem from a trunk and limbs that sprawl outwards. So a majority of shape will be in the center, and the form will become more loose and sparse as it spreads out. This means there will be smaller 'blobs' forming off of the main form. Oh, I should mention that you do this with a dark shade(your darkest that you will be using). I won't go into details with color selection, but let's just say I like to have my dark greens with a hint of blue in them.

http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/5883/treestep1yf8.png

Okay, now that we've got our blob, we want to flesh it out. And by flesh it out, I mean have sex with it. No, not really... but we still want to flesh it out. This will be the process of making our blob look more like a silhouette of a tree. To do this, we take our 2x brush and start brushing outwards from the blob, in very small strokes. You can also take the brush and erase it inwards in the same manner. This will result in something like...

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/7...estep1bge2.png

Yay! Now we have a great start. If you don't like your blob, start over or else your end result might not work out and you'll have to start ALL over. This is the easiest step, so don't be afraid of doing it over until you get something you like.

Step 2: Time to start making the leaves
This is one of the most time consuming tasks. You will either do it, or give up. I want to first cover something very important in making this tree -- clumping. What is this? It's what will break the monotony of your tree and also give it depth and life at the same time. What this is is the practice of making your leaves come outwards from a certain point, and appear as a clump of leaves. What you want to do is pick certain points of your blob that you would deem appropriate, and draw the leaves coming outwards from that point. Here is an image to demonstrate the direction to draw your leaves.

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/6...clumps1kk6.png

See what I mean? So pick an area and start drawing the leaves coming out from it. How will you draw the leaves? Simple. Take your handy 2x brush and draw small strokes going away from the clump... now you want to make sure that in the center of your clump is... well, a large clump of green. This will emphasize more leaves in this area, thus, making it stand out. This helps break the monotony. Now, to draw your leaves, you'll want to use a color that is slightly brighter than your dark shade used for your blob... now again, I won't go into details, but what I do to create a brighter shade is up the saturation, and move it a little into the green more. This creates a dull, bright green.

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/3...eestep2nz0.png

What you want to do while making your leaves is any time you find yourself drawing leaves far away from the clump, you make another clump. Just having too many individual leaves filling an area will make the tree look very, very flat. These clumps are all about giving it depth and volume. You'll notice that while drawing these leaves, I started making 'small' clumps revolving around the larger clumps. This again, helps relieve the monotony of just many, many leaves filling an area. You'll want to have these small clumps revolve around the actual clumps, not actually be treated as the larger clumps. Just blotch leaves together every now and then. Again, this is the longest part, so good luck.

Step 3: Highlights!
Now we'll start seeing our tree come to life. Again, you'll want to pick a lighter shade for this. Remember, add more saturation as you lighten it, more light = more color. Okay, this again makes use of your 2x brush. Start taking it and putting blotches over the centers of the clumps. Fill those spaces, but remember to make them look like leaves. Now, after you've highlighted the center of the clumps, you'll want to start highlighting leaves. A key note to remember is the farther you get away from the center of the clumps, the less you want the leaves highlighted. The more lighter pixels there are, the more they stand out. You don't want the mid-areas of the clumps to stand out as that kills the depth you're creating. Just look at my steps and notice how the center of the clumps have a higher ratio of highlights.

http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/1852/treestep3gx9.png

Okay, now this looks very work-in-process, regardless of it actually being nearly done. The leaves have no shape, and it all looks like someone just took a paintbrush and sprinkled paint on it. We can fix that, this step is very crucial in making your leaves look like leaves. You'll now want to move over to a 1x brush(smallest brush) and start shaping the highlights. Add a pixel or two to the square highlights to make them look more like leaves instead of boxes. Remember, a small pixel AWAY from the center of the clump makes the leaves look like they're coming out of the clump, not inwards(which you don't want). Finally, you'll want to take that 1x highlight and start highlighting the leaves farthest away from the center of the clump. This gives the outer leaves shape and form, while not making them stand out like the center.

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/4...estep3byg3.png

Step 4: More highlights
This step is very much like the previous step, except you're using a lighter shade to give more emphasis to the actual shape of the tree. What you want to do is start highlighting your other highlights, just to a lesser degree. Follow the same logic and it should end up looking like my image. Now, the tree still looks very WIPish, but that's fine. The last step will finish that up.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/1...eestep4xr4.png

Step 5: Finalizing time
You're almost done!!! But this is one of the more critical steps. You're going to really bring out the shape of the tree by adding a dark(almost black) tone in between the leaves. The trick to this is to add the most darkness to the areas the clumps merge, to emphasize on the fact that there is less light reaching there.

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/8...eestep5oi0.png

Now, remember how I said in the previous step that you'd fix the leaves to actually look like leaves? Well, here's the magic. You want to put sparse dark shades in between the leaves, but you want them shaped like an L. See?

http://img507.imageshack.us/img507/3...estep5bxw6.png

Now, you'll want to zoom into my progress into this step to see how I do it. I put it sparsefully in between the leaves to make them stand out, make them appear to 'pop'. Now, the added benefit of the L shape shading is that, zoomed out, it gives the leaves a more triangular shape, even if the leaves are actually squares. Pretty cool trick of the pixel, eh?

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Well, there you have it. Maybe I'll add a trunk to this later, but really, leaves are the hardest part of the tree. While this may be a time consuming process(I spent 2+ hours on this), it's the easiest I have done. It takes the least amount of skill, and really needs no reference. You may way to go after this and finalize things, fix things up, maybe even add an outline. What you may want to do is put sparse bits of transparency actually in the tree(most likely on the edges, where clumps merge) to make the tree seem more realistic, because tree's don't really have so much density of leaves to the point where the tree top is one large object. Putting these 'holes' in the tree will just make it look better. Perhaps I'll edit this later and add this feature, but I'm pooped.

I hope it helps.