This Photoshop tutorial was written by Olly for our Digital Painting magazine, back when digital art was a new and innovative art form. As such, you may find Olly using an older version of Photoshop (CS6 – yikes) and a precursor to today's Windows tablets, like Microsoft Surface Pro 9, he used an Asus EP121 (double yikes). But the ideas, approach, and techniques are timeless, so we figured this is a great tutorial to dig out and share. And with that, it's over to Olly…
Welcome to my first-ever digital plein air tutorial! I’m going to go over one of my current favourite things in digital painting – painting a traditional landscape from life en plein air. En plein air is French for ‘in the open air’. This is a great approach that I believe can help to push our understanding of light and colour when painting, and it happens to be a surprisingly challenging exercise, especially after only studying photos of landscapes.
