Today I'll be walking through how I made the background for a layout banner. I'm starting with my finished dolls and my background the size I want it.

It's a very specific size because it's a banner, how big yours is depends on how good you are at clipping back your work, I find it's easiest for me to make the canvas the size I need it and work inside that rather than trying to crop down after I'm finished. For the average doll I usually try to stay within a hundred pixels of the longest side of the original doll size. Say if I were going to put a background on the doll I did of the guy (Alex) by himself he's 96 pixels wide and 284 tall, That'd be a finished size of no more than 384x384.

I've already decided that this scene will be night and wintery causeit goes with my color scheme, but the techniques are the same to create rolling hills rather than snow drifts so don't worry if you want to do summer or fall or spring rather than winter.

I started with a dark blue and fill it on a fresh layer. Dark Blue not black!! Even if you're going for the dead of night, it's easier to make things darker than it is lighter without getting too much contrast.

I make a new layer. Then I start out with a big fluffy airbrush, about 100 pixel diameter for an image the size of mine, no hardness, default spacing and round and a darker blue. Almost black, but black would add a grayer undertone I'd rather not have.

I brush over the corners, wherever I think it'll look good or want darker. I also go in and add a bit of lighter blue where I want the sky lighter.

first I make a new layer then I pick a much brighter blue for step three. these'll be my clouds which I want pretty "glowy" Now with about a 45 airbrush I brush in some fluffy cloud thingies, just wherever looks good for my sky. I ended up with three sprinkled across horizontally.

I usuaully just burn the bottom of my clouds 15% opacity midtones and about a 35-45 size brush. Sometimes, especially with sunset pictures, burn makes the color bad, then I'll take and find a dark slightly warmer tone of the color to airbrush in, you don't want the shadow to be even, that makes it look unrealistic and cartoony. Just where and how ever you feel needs a shadow. If you're going for a sunset, burn/paint the top of your clouds, pay attention to your light source it helps.

I do a little paint/burn/dodge/smudge to get the hill to look three dimensional. I were creating a hill with grass on it I would take a size one brush on my smudge tool and pull up to create grass strands. (keep playing with this it can be very difficult to get right)

On a new layer paint one or two medium sized black lines with fairly straight and with medium hard edges. These are our trees. I have several different techniques for trees but this creates the type of tree I want for this image. after you're finished painting, smudge out (Making sure that your use all layers is not clicked) to create branches. Continue with the second tree.

Duplicate your layer and reposition it Merge the two tree layers together.

I decided I wanted one more tree, so I painted in another tree in the center. Merge all your tree layers together.

It hasn't look very foresty, has it? Now for a little trick. Copy your tree layer and paste it into something else for later use. Using transform-> scale, we squish the trees all to one side, deforming them and making them much taller than wide. When they look good, lock the layer tranparency and use a darkish blue to fill the layer. This fades the trees into the background.

Repeat step ten using progressively darker shades of blue until your forest is foresty enough.

Your background is pretty much done. You can add some fog--(I usually use the same color as my lightest foreground color) or frame or whatever trips your fancy.