Forests Made Easy:
This will be a easy way to make a quick forest in your backgrounds without having to put TOO much effort into it. What we will be doing is essentially making one tree that will become the entire forest. I recommend this ONLY to be used for trees that are in the far background due to the nature of how this is done.
The reasoning behind this copy-and-paste method stems from what game companies do. They will opt to make one tree model that they can basically use over and over only with different sizes and heights to make it different.
NOW before I take up anymore time on this! Let's get started!
Step one:
make a fairly large tree. Doesn't have to be pretty since it will ultimately be scaled down and certain details will be hard to tell if it's really just one tree. Figure 1 is the tree I'll be using. Copy the tree in question.
Step two:
Paste your newly created copy, and begin scaling it down, and changing their sizes up. Make some taller, make some shorter. Figure 2. shows various different copies at different heights. Notice how despite the fact that it IS the same tree, they are all starting to look a bit differently. This is in part the whole scaling down thing. Now make sure they are not overlapping each other, and then go to the "layer" button at the top, and click "merge visible" (warning: do this ONLY if you have either nothing else on your screen, or are prepared to work with no layers. Alternatively you may work on your forest on a separate image file and copy the forest into your drawing later)
Step 3:
now that you have a few trees, it's time to start putting them together in a group to make it look like a forest. Use the selection tools be it the "Rectangular marquee tool", or the "Lasso tool" and start moving them together. Make sure they overlap here, and if need be, adjust their sizes before you do move them over to make them a "forest"
During this time, you may paste more trees, resizing them and adding them to your collective forest, but also add a few irregular trees. Trees with few branches, trees that are bare, trees that look different from the rest. you don't have to add much, maybe a single drawn line or two with a few bristles like that one being pointed at in Figure 3. Keep pasting and expanding your forest to your heart's content, and merging to prevent there being too many copied layers and keep things less messy.
That's basically it! Figure 4 is a small completed forest! you may use any colors you want, if you would like to add more than one style of tree, by all means! experiment! this is just to help encourage those to try their hand at making backgrounds by making it easier
Tips:
rather than pasting single trees, you may want to copy small groups of them and pasting them together to make it easier still, but the problem with this is that you run the risk of a "repeated forest" which would make it look like the trees where copied. Try mirroring those copies, stretch them, shorten them, lengthen them or even ad a few new ones to help prevent the repeats.
