Painting or drawing Stone and Rock in photoshop can seem difficult. But in reality its not that hard. We are going to show you how you too can draw realistic stone and rock in photoshop using just a couple of techniques. With a little bit of practice you will master this art form.

Step 1

The first stage which forms the starting point for most of my digital work is a sketch done on paper. This is where I assemble any unformed ideas and decide on how the composition will be structured and try and give myself a template to begin working from. In picture below you can see a pencil sketch that I scanned in which would form the basis of my final painting. You can download the tutorial files to follow along.

For this tutorial I wanted to combine a natural looking rock face that incorporated some element of architecture that had been carved into the stone.

Step 2

The next stage was to get rid of the glaring white of the image and so I traced around the drawing and on a separate layer which I named Background, I used the Gradient tool fading from a pale to a darker green. On another new layer set to Hard Light I used a dark grey and filled in the area that makes up the rock itself and then to establish the light source I simply erased parts of this layer to reveal the white underneath, see the picture below.

It is important to define the light source as this is paramount in how the viewer reads the image and interprets the forms. Rock can be a difficult subject to paint as it varies tremendously, not only in its coloration but more importantly in its structure and the types of formations it adopts. Because its surface is so uneven with so many undulations and crevices it is easy to loose sight of the overall form and get too involved with details.

In order to keep control of the painting process I find it is best to work on a larger scale to begin with and gradually work your way down to the finer detail. In other words, decide on a light source and block in the main highlights and shadows and carve out the general structure and form of your image before concentrating on the numerous incidental passages that will help add interest and detail to the final piece.

Step 3:

In Fig03 you will notice that I have added a new layer which I called Main and begun to rough in some of the areas that fall into shadow and started to shape some of the crevices. I used warm tones ranging between those seen on the left using a standard soft round airbrush with a varied diameter.

I set the opacity to between 65 and 100% and the flow to around 50% using pen pressure to control it as shown below the brush pre-sets. It does not matter too much how rough your marks are at this stage as the painting will go through a process of refinement until it is finished.

Quick and seemingly random marks are perfectly suitable and may even inadvertently suggest part of the final outcome so be bold and carefree!

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