Illustrator | Trees

I started with the upper parts of my scenery today, creating the trees. They are the pinnacle of my book cover and its scary themes so I planned to have them completely bare as I always think trees with no leafs look much more intimidating, and they also had to fit in with the wintery theme. 

I used a bitmap image to trace around some of the branches of an actual tree as practise, and then I imported them into my book cover and began drawing the rest of the tree. To do this I used the pen tool as it allows for great accuracy. 

Once these outlines were finished I made replicas of them and mirrored them so I had two rows of trees to line the path Mole eventually would have to walk down. I then resized them in order to add a sense of perspective that would drag the readers eye into the middle of the cover where the title would eventually be seated.

Outlines

To me the trees definitely felt like they had something missing, so I started making a new brush with a bark style texture on it. Again this was inspired by David Petersens work but I put my own spin on it by making knots in the trees as I added more and more of the texture to the tree. 

Tree Texture

Textured rows