*sigh*

So, instead of updating this regularly with my progress, I jumped right in, worked, then came down with an agressive strain of the cold brought in by my dayjob "customers" which had me munching antibiotics and sleeping for the past two days.

So here's where I'm now, skipping about two updates I sent my client.

Jeffery Ross Commission (NA) Preview5.jpg

Okay, for the forests:
1.) create two custom brushes (coniferous & decidous);
2.) pick two colors for each (dark green and blue-ish green for coniferous, an a desaturated lighter green and yellow-ish green for decidous), set Color Dynamics to FG/BG Jitter 100%, Hue, Saturation & Brightness jitter to 4% each;
3.) lay in your forest; make sure you have some decent spacing, otherwise you won't get any useful contours;
4.) Duplicate your forest layer;
5.) Select your first forest layer; create a new, empty layer above it;
6.) CTRL + leftclick on your first forest layer in the layers tab;
7.) Add a dark stroke of 2px in the new, empty layer;

Your layers should now look like this:
forest 2
stroke
forest 1

Duplicate your upper forest layer, then hit CTRL + U; desaturate the layer, then switch the layer style to Overlay.
Create one last, empty layer and move it to the bottom. Take a sponge/grunge brush and fill out the background with the foreground color you used when you laid in the forest. Done.

If you want, ou can now add shadows to the forest edge, tree trunks etc.