Step: Painting the Background
Brushes Used: Square Chalk, Digital Airbrush, Camelhair brush

Whenever I start an image, whether it's an illustration or a concept or whatever, I always paint from the back forward. So I bring the background up to a nearly finished level, then paint characters or foreground details on top of it. There's a few reasons for this, but the most important is that it's a lot harder to go back and draw something convincingly behind a foreground object if you do it last. Even using layers, I just find it so much more difficult than painting the background first.

The other big reason is that I like to save the fun stuff for last. If I spend two hours painting a cool character, I find it incredibly hard to find the discipline to go back and spend another hour or two making a background for him or her.

I started on a canvas about 1500 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high. I usually start a little smaller than this, but I know I'm not going to be using any crazy-huge brushes, so it's fine.

(Image 1.1) My first step wass to dump a neutral gray colour for the background. Using the square chalk brush, I painted in a horizon and a ground plane using a lighter gray. With the same brush, I started to draw the basic shapes of some trees, some specks of snow in the air and on the ground, and some dark grey blotches for the beginnging of ice. Keep it very loose at this point... the goal is to build up to a consistent level of detail, not to have one corner of the image done while the rest looks like an incoherent blob.

I used the digital airbrush tool on a low-opacity setting with a light gray colour to add in some mist and some cloud things. I used gray instead of white because pure white tends to look unnatural.

I'm not using any layers for this step, BTW. I tend to only use 2 or 3 layers in a whole image: background, foreground, and a layer for details or elements I'm not sure I'll want to keep.

(Image 1.2) Using a darker grey than before, I continued painting trees with the chalk brush. For the thinner trees, I might switch to the camelhair brush to get a crusper line. I added a few more specks of white for snow, and darken up the area behind the trees to add a little depth.

(Image 1.3) Painting more trees (yes, it's repetitive). Again, I used a darker colour and a slightly bigger brush this time to add depth. I also started painting some tufts of snow leaning against the base of the trees.

At this point, I started to think that the composition was getting to be a bit too linear with all the perfectly vertical trees, so I copied the whole layer and pasted it on top of itself. Using the rotate tool, I turned it slightly on an angle to help fight the linearity.

When I did this, I had to extend the bottom and top right corners to match my original frame. Using the colour picker, I chose nearby colours and just painted out from those areas.

After that, I started in on some detail. I painted small clumps of snow hanging on appropriate parts of the trees, and more snow falling from the sky. It was looking a little too bright, as well, so I used the digital airbrush to lightly glaze on a darker colour in the upper right and middle left.

I worked a little on the ice in the bottom right by smearing some paint around to give it a 'wet' look, and even started to indicate a little bit of bark on the trees.

The painting is still very loose, but you can tell what things are and I think the detail level has been brought up to an acceptable point. I will add some minor things later, but the bulk of the work is done. Now that I'm ready for the next step, I will up-rez my picture to somewhere between 3000 and 4500 pixels, depending on how detailed I want the final image to be. This one I set at 4000 pixels tall.

Onto the character.