Tropical Rainforest

One of my favorite things to do for my kids is make them art for their bedroom walls. It’s a good creative outlet for myself to work on something fun and explore a different skill set or technique, and at the same time make something that’s meaningful.

For this project, I was inspired by the vivid colors of a tropical rainforest — along with the abundant amounts of wildlife within.

I started this project with research into the types of plants and animals that inhabit this ecosystem and gathering photo reference material. I took all of that information and created vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator of each element I wanted to show in the poster design. The final step was bringing all of those vector shapes into Adobe Photoshop and setting the scene. Using lots of custom brushes and clipping paths, I worked from back to front layering on elements of trees, branches, leaves and other foliage until I was happy with the depth of the scene.

A key learning in this project was creating a few “leaf” brushes to help fill out the trees and bushes. I created several leaf designs in Illustrator and brought them into photoshop to create as custom brushes — adjusting the various settings to make them look natural and not duplicates.