Check the original painting here.
And here’s the digital painting tutorial / process:
1) Putting basic colors with swatches I made. Hard Brush with low Flow. working on small size of something like 1000px width.
2) Adding a few trees. ofcourse far trees, less details, less contrast with background, close trees, the opposite.
3) Now I resize the image to 3000px width and start details. I created 2 custom brushes. 1 for the trees, I want them to duplicate randomly to make it look like a forest. and the other brush for branches for the same reason.
4) Here I took a few green colors with mix of tiny texture brushes and start making ground on a really small area. Then I start duplicate the small area to the whole image, while playing with the size and rotating.
5) Continue duplicating and changing the Blending Mode in the Path area to Color Dodge, to make it more… glow.
6) You can see the whole grass. and the branches at the top I did by taking the ground and masking it with branches brush.
7) Here is the big detailing. actually I work on it by the time of the whole painting, but because it is in one layer it will show like this. So you see I add shades to trees, more grass, more custom random brushes.
8) Here is the big change – the Color Layers. I will not get into details, it’s just a mix of a lot of Color Balance (like this one a lot), Curves while changing Blending Modes and Masking a bit. In addition I add those little flowers glowing there in the right bottom of the image.
9) More Color Layers. Overlay Blending Mode Air Brush to create the light effect in the middle. At the end I use Unsharp Mask Filter, that you can notice in the original painting deviation.