Making a Path of Leaves (Patreon)

I want to make more tutorials of some basic things I do in my comics, so I thought I would focus on something a little less involved and simpler than my previous behind the scenes posts. So I'm going to look at a small detail from the last  comic. Namely, the path of leaves that Krom places on the ground when trying to complete the world quest. I use the brush feature of Photoshop quite a lot in the comics, and I thought this detail illustrated some of those uses pretty well.

First thing I did was find a good leaf image. I used this image from Wikipedia which is public domain:

I then removed the white part of the image using the magic wand tool, and filled the leaf with black (I erased part of the stem too):

As you can see, this step doesn't look very pretty, and it doesn't have to. The final leaves are pretty small, so the rough aliased edges won't really be visible in the end.

I then selected the leaf and went to Edit>Define Brush Preset. This turns the black leaf into a brush.

However, if you try to paint with the brush, each stroke of the leaf will be so close together that the brush won't even resemble a leaf:

So we need to adjust the brush settings. Go to Window>Brush settings, and this will open a window with many options.

Spacing:

In the brush tip shape section, you can adjust the spacing between each stroke of the brush. This will result in more spaced out leaves you can actually see.

 Now the problem is that the leaves are too uniform. They are all the same size, same orientation, and all in one line.  

These are all details that can be adjusted in brush settings as well under "Shape Dynamics".

I set "Size Jitter" to 100% and control it with "Pen Pressure". This controls how much the size of the brush is randomized each time it is drawn. If you aren't using a tablet with a pen, you can set the Jitter to something smaller, like 40%.

Similarly, "Angle Jitter" controls how much the brush's rotation is randomized. I set this to 100%.

Finally, "Roundness Jitter" randomizes the dimensions of the image. You can play around with different values until you get what you want.

The final product is a brush stroke with varying sizes and directions of leaves, but they all still lie in a nice clean path. I want them to be more scattered as I draw them.

These features can be controlled in the "Scattering" section of the brush settings. "Scatter" controls how far away from your brush the leaves are spread, count increases the number of leaves in the space, similarly to "spacing" in the Brush Tip Shape section,

The result looks a lot more like what we want:

Now we just need color. I pick two colors for the leaves, a foreground and a background. By adjusting "Color Dynamics" in the brush settings, I can have the leaves' color be randomized within the range of the two colors.

I went with a light and darker gold color. I made the background black so it would be easier to see:

Now to get the glow, I simply duplicated this layer twice so I had 3 copies of the same layer. The layer on top I leave as is. For the layers below I apply a "Gaussian Blur" filter (Filter>Blue>Guassian Blur).

One layer I set to a smaller blur, about (10px or so), the second a larger blur (50px or so). These numbers might vary based on the size of your image. But the resulting effect is a small glow around each leaf, as well as a larger glow around the leaves as a whole:

For Krom's actual circle in this comic, I made a circular path and stroked the path with the brush (I wanted it to be really round). For his wiggly path, I simply drew it on as I did in this tutorial.

You can also use similar steps for making snow, dust, trees (you can see my application of brushed-on trees in the background of the same comic), grass, etc.

Anyway, please let me know if you guys find this interesting at all, I can do more tutorials in the future if you guys are into them.