CGSociety - The Green Man Awakens

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Phil McDarby turns a dry, cracked old tree into
a mysterious encounter in the Greenwood Deep.

CGSociety :: EXPOSE 7 Tutorial
28 August 2009, by Phil McDarby

This little girl has wandered into the depths of the forest, and chanced upon The Greenwood Deep - the heart of the wood. I wanted to create a river of power, the forest's golden blood, surrounded by faery dwellings, all in the shadow of the ancient tree.

I found this tree about a year ago, basking in the blazing sunshine of June, at the height of summer. I loved the almost crown-like form of the branches. I saw this ancient creature, leaning over, almost bowing and an idea began to take shape.

I wanted to use and recreate the scene into an encounter between one species and another in a glade. Unfortunately, the initial shot I took was hopelessly blurred and unusable, so I went out to photograph it again a few months later, to get a higher-resolution base plate for this image. I found it looked considerably different in March - much more muted and autumnal.

I started building up his face in profile. First, I sketched a rough out line of his features. I was trying to capture a sense of wisdom and kindness. A golden eye appeared, his slightly hooked nose, and I started working on his beard, going for as knotted and gnarled a look as I could. I referenced various root/ivy shots and built it up strand by strand using a hard Brush, some basic Layer Style settings (Faint Bevel, Inner Shadow, Texture Overlay) augmented by slivers of my own shots (I have a huge library of roots, gnarled knots, moss etc). A faint smile appeared, but it was far too subtle and needed to be drawn out.

At this point, I started to play with anatomy, a suggestion of shoulders, and arms behind his back. I changed his eye to be looking slightly outward, and masked out everything I didn’t want, freeing up his form and allowing me to get a sense of his full shape. There are lots of different ways of masking, but for me, the most effective and surefire way of getting the precision you want is to zoom right in and use the Lasso, holding Shift and lassooing out segment after segment. I extend his crown out by using a mixture of cloning and painting - faint dodges and burns to mimic the right lighting. At this early stage, I was starting to wonder if he was too squat.

I started adding the suggestion of arms, and did away with the ground plane, planning on creating a gnarled promontory for him to perch on. The network of roots grew gradually, lending a sense of scale and height, created with a mixture of photo slivers, cloning and painting, to create a sense of age and complexity. I decided to weave the bedrock into his promontory. I was trying to create a sense of the ages. This old soul is a part of the roots of the earth, existing for millenia as the seasons turn.

The bedrock rose up around the roots, built up layer by layer using elements of my own library, painting, and cloning. I wanted to convey the same sense of weathered age as the roots. I drew his left hand out, trying to capture a sense of him clinging to his stone base, added the suggestion of a right arm to balance his body, and removed some of his humped back. Even at this stage, I wasn’t entirely happy with this rocky outcrop - it looked too precarious, and I knew there would another character for him to interact with to a create a sense of narrative.