I’ve been thinking lately a lot about a single tree. I really wanted to find one to photograph, but so far, I haven’t travelled out into the country areas where I am sure to find one, so for now I decided I couldn’t wait. I drew a tree instead and added layers of colour in Photoshop CS4, a layer of my own photograph of a cloud, and adjusted it with some soft focus in Nik Color Efex Pro 4, to give it that painterly oil painting look. I hope you like it :)

• also used some textures from Shadowhouse Creations and Flypaper :)

As part of my process, I photographed the pencil drawing with my iPad and worked it up with textures and layers using iPad apps, til I was happy with the result. I then photographed the pencil drawing with my good camera and went to work, to simulate this/these effects, in Photoshop, etc, to create a nice large file. I’ll post a picture shortly of the original pencil drawing and the mockup I did on the iPad, so you can compare all three.

Here is the picture outlining the progression below:

The first image is just the pencil drawing, the 2nd image is the iPad workup, the third image is the painted version overlayed and worked on in PS CS4 and Nik Color Efex with overlays and textures from Shadowhouse and Flypaper