Gardenscape 🪴📖✨ + Process (Patreon)

Hi Patrons! 💚🌼

How are you all doing? 🥰

I’m excited to show my latest piece today called Gardenscape. 🪴✨

This piece took longer than I expected since I really wanted to take my time adding in all the little details! I’ve been spending my weekends going to the nurseries and I’ve been treating myself to some new houseplants! 🪴 I’ve gotten really interested in learning more about them. It’s been really nice tending them and seeing them grow! 🌱I must say It’s quite a relaxing process! So I wanted to paint this piece inspired by my love for houseplants. 🥰

Process:

I normally don’t work with a lot of layers for smaller pieces but since this was a large undertaking, it has over 200 layers (238 to be exact) for all the extra overlapping leaves and details!

I used a lot of bathroom references for this piece, particularly with a frontal perspective. I think it’s important to gather as many references as you can when you’re doing a large scene like this! I didn’t include all the different plants I was looking at in this reference image but as you can see, I’ve gathered different references for specific items including the treatment of the tiles, the bathroom designs, lighting, plant variety, etc. 

As for the colour palette, I knew I wanted to use a lot of greens with hints of red to complement the palette.

Usually, I play around with the curves tool to see a variety of interesting colour combinations in the early stage.

This helps me set the mood and tone for the image.

To determine the lighting, I add a quick adjustment layer using levels and highlight areas where the light will be affected. I merge the adjustment layer to each specific layer so that way I can just paint over it.

Many of the small details are inspired by Ghibli (image on the right). I really like how they add wear and tear to their backgrounds to give it character so I wanted to add a bit of that to the tiles and wooden panels.

For this particular painting: I really wanted the greens to shine through but also make the reds pop so I use the selective colour, colour balance, hue and saturation and play around with the greens, yellows and reds.

I also make sure to increase the saturation in some areas especially at the centre where the light source is.

I’m really proud of this piece! It was a lot of fun looking at all the different houseplants! 🥰

❁ ROSELLA MAIL REWARDS ❁

Unfortunately, the postcards haven't arrived yet and I checked the tracking yesterday and it said it should be here by June 17th! I’m really sorry for the delay! Not too sure why it’s taking this long but I will ship it out as soon as it gets here. Thanks so much for your patience! 😊

Thank you so much for your support!! I really appreciate it!!

Love,

Maxine