Matte painting of a forest (2008)

I was inspired to paint this after watching Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke. It was painted entirely in The GIMP using a tablet. There are 174 layers. The whole painting took eight days to complete.

Matte painting of a forest

Generally, the steps I took for each object in the scene were as follows:

1. Block in the shape of the object. This was then transferred to the mask of each layer.
2. Draw several layers of texture.
3. Apply filters to the textures to add relief or distortion.
4. Draw several layers of lighting with varying levels of detail.

I made four animated/directional brushes to make texturing easier: scribble, moss, grass and leaves.

Scribble brush

Moss brush

Grass brush

Leaves brush

The depth of field effect was added at the end by consolidating layers and blurring them selectively.

These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.