This project was inspired by my love for nature and so I chose a letter which I decided could be designed as a tree and have room for branches and vines on it. 

My background layer was the scan of the sketch I made which represented all the ideas I had for the letter 'I'. I began illustrating the project layer by layer with each section of the sketch having its own distinct layer to make editing easy. And then I began outlining each feature of the different layers before colouring them in with the brush and bucket fill tool.

I continued making the letter come to life and chose various shades of green which I felt complemented themselves to make the tree look realistic. Careful detailing was also added to each layers' feature as I went on, and I used the brush tool to smoothen out the parts of the tree.

I got the majority of my colour shades from plant related images which I found online and my inspiration image which I concluded suited the picture best and so used the eyedropper tool to use the colours on my 'I tree'. Once everything was coloured in nicely, I added a new layer which was initially white, so the background layer was out of sight and the picture would be neater.

After that I added a clipping mask onto the layer of the 'I' which I used to colour the none tree parts of the I brown so that the tree parts can stand out and the brown would not appear anywhere I else than a selected area.

I added another clipping mask over the Tree layer so the greens all blended and went from darkest to lightest green.

Lastly, I put some colour gradient in the background that blended very well with the Illustrated letter and let it stand out more and used the polygonal lasso tool to sharpen the edges of the letter I. From there was able to compare my letter with the illustrated letter I found on the internet that was my inspiration and reference.