Evynd Earle painting technique class demo

I did an Evynd Earle style painting technique demo in class this week. I taught my students how to replicate the look and feel of an Evynd Earle's background painting for Sleeping Beauty.

This is my demo painting.

Below, are the process of how I got there. Enjoy!

I Especially like these beautiful trees in his painting below. This is one of the scenes from Sleeping Beauty.

Back in Evynd's time, everything had to be hand painted. Now, with photoshop, it's a bit easier to replicate some of the graphic style that he employed in his paintings. But I still wanted that hand painted feel as much as possible. I think the best area that really stands out as 'hand painted feel' are the beautiful tree trunks. So I decided to at least hand paint that. The first thing I did was paint an hand painted texture that I can use for tree bark. This was done with acrylics.

Then I made the texture a bit more pleasing and closer to the look and feel of Sleeping Beauty style bark, because this painting lacked the feel that I was going for. Here's the cleaned up texture.

Now, the fun part. I made a silhouette of a tree shape and pasted this hand painted texture on to the tree shape.

Just the silhouette above, and the texture applied to the tree below.

Then here's the tree in a partially painted background. But the tree bark texture feels very random and not that pleasing to the eye. Has too many holes, and I'm starting to see the repeated texture. Which is bad since computers are really good at doing that. I really wanted the hand painted feel that Evynd has in his tree trunks.

But I first started adding washes of color to start making the tree feel like it's in the environment. This is done with the overlay technique in photoshop