This is a walkthrough for my last painting 'The Last Remainder'. You can find the painting here. I want to show you the general process of my work and maybe give you some guidance for how to work on a painting. 

	Step 1: This is the first step. Most times I sketch down my idea on paper first - it's a quick way to work, and you can try out different ideas. I gave the tree a somehow weird shape, to underline that it is a special one, the last. I scanned the sketch and increased the contrast a little. This is going to be the basis for my painting.
	Step 2: I created a simple colour gradient to give myself an idea of how the background colours will work out later. I also started to block in the general colours of my rocks and of the tree. It is important that you ensure that the background (the gradient) does NOT show through your block colours. They are the bases for your later painting, so you won't have to cover every spot with strokes. I made this mistake myself and had to perform a lot of corrections later.
	Step 3: I started to paint the tree, choosing a hard brush with sizes between 1 and 4 pixels. The small size allowed me to give the tree some structure. It's good to have a tablet so that you can use the pen pressure options in the brush rollout. I mostly used similar colours for the tree, because I wanted it to look rather bare, scoured by wind and dust.
	Step 4: The first step of painting the tree complete, I started to shade it a bit. The Burn Tool and Dodge Tool work great here. The shading is a very important part of the process because it gives the shapes a little volume and defines proper light flow in the piece. That said, I shaded only a little here, because I prefer to do the main shading at the end.
	Step 5: The shading with burn/dodge didn't satisfy me totally, so I overworked it by taking a low-opaque brush with very bright or dark colours and painting over the tree. As you can see, I also started painting the rocks. In this case you can choose a bigger-sized brush, as they don't need so much detail. I also decided to remove the very small rocks I had in the basic sketch because they didn't fit the overall look of image. I wanted big and smooth rocks. It's always nice to have some small details like cracks. Cracks are easy to paint. Be sure to have a small brush size (I use 1 or 2 pixels). Choose a very dark colour and paint your crack. Then change the colour to a very bright one and paint next to the dark line, following it. On cracks you can always see the light on one side of the crack, otherwise it has no depth.
	Step 6: Using the methods described above, I painted some more rocks and shaded them.

- Tutorial written by Daniel Alekow

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