GIF of the making of the panda:

This photomanipulation I made for an assignment in the course Digital Painting during my term abroad at Art Design Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
I chose that I wanted to make some big, almost mystical creature, in its "natural" enviroment. My idea started with the animal being the panda.

The final image contains 15 different images. To really see the differences I make, I suggest looking and reading first and then only browse through the images.

I will share my thoughts and process for this piece below, enjoy!

↓ Photoshop process ↓

As always it started with a rather modest sketch. A giant sized panda sitting in the forest eating from its dense vegetation. To help show the size of the panda, the background will be open and wide with mountains from left to right. A mist in the foreground will help with the mystical feeling of the giant animal.

To get the best background I chose to combine one with good vegetation at the bottom and one with a great misty mountainscene

The two layers overlapped eachother and with separate masks. I used the brush with low flow (~8%) to slowly "merge" the two images into one scene.

To further make it look like one picture and to set the mood for the picture the background was color corrected by lowering the saturation so it felt more mellow.

When I found the perfect panda I still had to clean it up from scraps and cut it out with out ruining too much.

The first cutout was quite rough since I wanted to get rid of all color shining through the fur at the edges. I used the pen tool to get nice control over the rounded areas and in some areas I used Color range to get rid of the green shining through. To erase all the scraps I delicately used the Clone stamp tool with a Flow of about 15%.

I knew from the beginning it would be easier make new fur around the edges than to finely erase the negative space from the original.

Here is the layer of added fur just to see how much I actually added. To add the fur I used Clone stamp tool with the brush being grass that was randomized in direction with every new click. So I just cloned the fur a bit to the inside of the panda to get perfect match in color and light.

Before any further modification to the panda I color corrected it with Curves to get a bit more contrast aswell as darkening it down to match the mood of the background.

Next step was shadows so the panda would fit into the scene, where the light comes from the far left. Shadows comes from a separate layer on top of the panda with the Blend mode set to multiply and then chose a dark colour from the panda itself to match.

Highlights were made like the shadows with a new layer, but the Blend mode set to Screen and the color set to the brightest color on the fur. The highlights were then colord in using the brush tool just like the shadows.

Now to the story of the picture. The panda is feasting on the dense forest.

Motionblur was added to the food falling down for more realism.

The falling food was color corrected changing the hue and saturation to look like the trees below.

Several other trees was added to the left paw as if the panda is ripping it up from the ground to eat it.

Color correction of the trees aswell as shadow and highlights to match the lightning of the scene.

To make it look like he is sitting down the valley amongst the trees. More forest was added in front to make it more realistic.

Again with color correcting, changing the hue and saturation to match the rest of the scene. Also a bit of Gaussian blur to reduce the sharpness (of the newly added trees) as the panda is supposed to be far away.

To give perspective to the depth of the scene aswell as the immense size of the panda, I added birds circulating it. Tiny in comparison.

Gaussian blur added to the birds since they are not at big as the panda and therefore should become more blurry in the distance.

Mist was added amongst the bottom of the panda to again add to the mood of the mystical creature and scene. Made in a separate layer with just grey color and low flow on the brush to slowly work in the mist where it was dense and not. 

For the final touch I added a color-cast layer with a circular gradient originating from the sun as yellowish to a dim grey-blueish to match the background and mist in the foreground.

I hope you liked this project of mine, leave a like if you enjoyed it.