Hi there piggies! I’m Sawa Bialczynska and I run Psilocybe Studio with my husband and my dog (hugely important for you to know). Let me show you how to make a proper pigcelart tree.

I am using Photoshop CC for my art.

LEAVES (foliage part)

Start with drawing a leafy foliage contour shape. Remember that its color should be neither too bright nor too dark (I chose #678048)

pic. 1. Working document size is 456/256 px.

Next – copy the element, rotate it a bit and choose a slightly darker shade of color for it (e.g. #576d3d) – pic. 2. Repeat the transformation once again choosing an even darker color and making the element a bit smaller – pic. 3. Copy the element once more, rotate it slightly and make it the same color of the first brightest element – pic. 4. Choose a color one shade lighter than the original and draw light reflexes on the leaves. Remember to pay attention to light angle – pic. 5. With even lighter color, highlight single pixels on the brightest parts of our leaves – pic. 6. Finally choose a color a bit darker than the darkest leaves color so far and draw leaf contours on the darkest part – pic.7.

TRUNK

Now, let’s take a shot at the trunk. The document’s size, in which I do this is 250/256 px. Choose a color that suits you, I chose (#364548) and draw the trunk’s contour.

Next, choose a color a shade darker and highlight the texture of our tree. Remember that its shape needs to be natural and a bit round, avoid geometrical and sharp edges. Darker spots seem to be further away, thus it is worth to highlight the contour line with a darker color and so simulate the third dimension.

Now, using a lighter color highlight some areas of our trunk (I used the #4e6359 color), even brighter pixels on the edges bring out its shape even more.

Now, draw moss patches, mine consist of four colors: brown at the bottom #746744, bright green higher up #90994e, I put a bit lighter and more saturated #abbc40 color on top. All is finished with a few single pixels of #d0da8b color.

Mark the knots with a color slightly darker than the basic one. Draw single leaves with the foliage colors (the middle color as base, a darker contour line and light reflexes on the leaves with the brightest one), also choose a color to draw a liana and give our tree a more boggy look. And here you are, our tree trunk is ready *wink*.

FOLIAGE

13. Copy the leaves onto our trunk document a few times and position them in such a way, that they constitute the foliage (using the “flip horizontal” option after right-clicking with your mouse on the chosen layer), then flatten them together so they make one joint layer (right-click on all three and choose “merge layers”).

Copy the element a few times more and position the copies into a shape that suits us. Darken each subsequent lower layer by lowering their “lightness” in the Hue&Saturation panel (you can enter it by clicking cmd + U on a proper layer). You can make the whole foliage smaller if you want to.

Now it is up to you how you shape your tree. I merged all layers (merge layers) and copied them once more.

The last thing I did was darkening one of my foliage copies and adding single leaves (just as the ones on the trunk) in some places to make the tree look as natural as possible.

Bah! There it is. The PigcelTree™! Merry Christmas!

(listen to my favourite xmas mix if you like)