Aerial Illustration In Photoshop

So you know that some of the ideas don’t just pop up in your head while you’re sleeping haha, (some do though), but we also go through that stage that you just need to look for inspiration.

So one day, we were just looking around and found an image that we really really liked, and decided to recreate it. Take a look at our creative process below and if you want you can also watch the video tutorial here.

You can download the file here and follow along with us!

Aerial Illustration

References

So we were there, just going through our Pinterest, and saw this image from this project, it was published in archdaily and it is called Tirana 2030.

It is a nice project, we liked the representation of the project, how they chose the colors, and we just liked it a lot.

Our first mistake

And we just went all out, we were excited to recreate this image, so we took one of our projects and tried to make the same image, and we were just in shock at how awful it came out, hahah.

Dissecting the difference

We were like hold up, we need to understand the image first, what does this image have that we like? So we started looking closer to find out that it had a consistent grass texture, a significant amount of pine trees, it was an aerial view, and it also had a specific color palette, it had a lot of detail.

Get render project ready

We didn’t want to make it the exact image, so we took our own project. We created a base clay render, in SketchUp, you can find the V-ray settings and having the material override option on, and choose the white color. We exported this clay render and the line file in a very big size, so we could zoom in on all of that detail.

We imported these images into photoshop, overlaid the line layer over the render layer, and use the multiply option.

Grass texture

We then searched for a grass texture, but this time, we made this texture into a pattern in photoshop. Then using the wand tool, we selected all of the places where grass would go, then we created a new layer and painted the selection with a solid color.

On that new layer, we right-clicked, and selected blending options, then selected pattern overlay and we chose the grass texture we made as a pattern previously.

Road texture

And we proceed to do the same process with the roads in our project.

Trees

We know that the trees had a significant role in this image, so we created our own pine tree brush or you can also download our SIB brushes here. We started painting one by one, so we just went to the brush settings and turned on the scattered option so each time you click multiple trees appear, it can save you tons of time.

We added other trees, with different colors, two more colors. So we had three different colors of trees.

Pedestrian texture

By now we knew we were achieving our wanted image. We also added some textures for the pedestrian path, we used the same process and we used a warm texture.

Adding people

Since the people were going to be very small, we didn’t take too much time into it, so we just used the same brush and chose a white color, and then started painting people where we knew they were going to be visible.

Highlight color

Finally, we were trying to see what made this image stand out from the rest, and it was the high light color. So we selected the library, some pedestrian paths and the first floors of some buildings

And we just paint it red, we chose this color because it made a nice contrast between green and white.

Final image. We were so happy with the final image! We were glad that we were able to find every single detail of what we liked from the original image, so in the end, we could achieve this. Did you like our process?

We love how it turned out and especially how we got to this point. Watch the video tutorial below!