Digital Deer and Maple Tree Painting - WIP3

More progress on my autumn doe and buck painting. I spent some time working on the tree trunks, getting those roughed in. For this part I switched from Photoshop to ArtRage to get a more painterly look in the tree bark. Fortunately, the creators of ArtRage, Ambient Design, had Photoshop users in mind when they developed this software, so moving from Photoshop to ArtRage and back is very easy. ArtRage imports Photoshop's PSD files and preserves all your image's layers and transparency. Again, one of the big advantages of painting digitally is being able to create layers, so having ArtRage keep those intact is really important. It will also preserve all that so exporting back to Photoshop goes just as smoothly.

Here I was able to paint the tree bark and ground behind all the other layers. This saves a lot of time not having to paint around each leaf as I would have to do if I'd painted from front to back with traditional oils.

Detail is often more fun for me than blocking stuff in so I took a little break from the trees to detail the buck's eyeball. What big, beautiful "Bambi" eyes deer have!

All right, back to work on the trees now ...