Painted Art in Photoshop - 8 Steps to Custom Artwork

If you ever dreamed of being a painter, but never had the time to learn how to mess with all the messy paints, Photoshop offers an alternative that is easy and will still produce pieces that you’ll be very proud of. Whether you make them just to play around with, have craft purposes in mind, or want a visually stunning piece to base a web design on, digitally painting landscapes can be fun and meet your needs.

Let’s dig right in and learn how to do a complete, hand-painted landscape in 8 steps. You will need the tool pack at www.my-photoshop.com/painttools.zip installed in Photoshop CS2 to get started. Just right-click the link and choose "Save Target As". It will download as a .zip file that you will need to unpack. Inside the .zip is a brush set containing trees and grasses. Alternatively, you could visit Adobe Studio and find brushes of trees and grasses that you'd like to use. Install the brushes in your Photoshop/Presets/Brushes folder.

Beyond that, you don’t need anything special - this tutorial is being written with a mouse, so you don’t need a graphic tablet.

One: Install the brushes contained in the tool pack .zip and open Photoshop. Create a new canvas (File, New) sized at about 400 x 200 pixels, in RGB mode, with a white background. You can start out with a much larger canvas if you’re comfortable with it. What I recommend is starting out with a smaller one so you can easily get used to the process. After you've performed the process once, you'll be able to adjust the techniques to suit any style of landscape you want to produce.

Two: Make a new layer (Layer, New, Layer). With a standard round brush and 3 colors representing the sky, make some random strokes on the canvas. Remember that we'll be using silhouettes for the trees and grasses, so you will want to base your colors on a darker sky - evening, night, dawn, or stormy skies are all good inspiration. Technically, you could do a summer's day as well, but it won't look quite right with the silhouettes we're using.