Drawing a forest

[Laime]

Hey guys, I've been trying to draw a forest on my map and not really succeeding for some time. I've attached what I have so far but it doesn't look right, and at this point I don't see what else I could do to make it look better/more realistic. I would be happy with any advice, combination of filters/layers or whatever else you can suggest. I'm working in Photoshop.

[Blaidd Drwg]

Well, I'm no Photosoup expert by any means, but I'll give it a try. Mind you, I think it doesn't look bad at all!
First of all, you'll want to change the order of the layers, since now you have the trunks of the trees overlapping a mountaintop (lower left corner). Secondly, maybe a texture underneath the forest would look good. I'm sure the tutorial/resource section can provide you with some eye candy I really like the colour you've chosen and the paper shines through really nicely.

[Aenigma]

It's not THAT bad. I actually quite like it. I myself have the same problem with drawing forest. What I do; is that I have a small bunch of trees that I made, which I paste side by side and upon eachother... But it's painstakingly slow to do so without it looking like... well, crap.

Your method, in ways of simplicity, is much better Much less a pain in the %¤##¤!!

[tilt]

agree with the others - its not bad at all - I think the forrest could benefit from some harder edges to fit more with the look of the mountains and then you could add some three contours here and there in the mass of the forrest.

[Daelin]

Maybe a slight outline around the forest and then some scattered treetops here and there, pointy or rounded, depending on the types of trees.

But not bad at all, no.

[Ascension]

I tried out a few different techniques and none of them fit the style of the mountains. The problem is that the mountains are hatched with crisp lines and follow a rough topography of the slope on the shadow side. With forests you'd have to spend a lot of time putting in crisp lines in the shadow area to follow the rough topography of the foliage...I don't have that sort of patience or skill. I tried some basic squiggles and that didn't look right, I tried my normal style and that looked ok but didn't fit the mountains, and then I tried crisp line shading but it looked like junk. My suggestion would be to look through the Reference Material section here and see what has been posted and look for old maps that fit the style and see how they did forests...I'm guessing that they relied on single trees scattered loosely about to represent a forest. For what it's worth, it looks decent but maybe go a bit lighter on the green (turn down the opacity some) and put your lines in first then go back and add color last.