How to Create a Dark Mysterious Hideout from a Rough Sketch

Learn how to create a dark mysterious hideout in a rocky mountainous place in Photoshop. How will we find this tutorial useful? Well, I won’t brag about this tutorial, so I have to tell you that I won’t promise you special or sophisticated techniques used in this tutorial. However, by reading and following this tutorial, you will be amazed at how simple and essential techniques like blending, masking, color adjustments, basic painting, and some others can be easily applied to create a nice scenic panorama.

What You’ll Be Creating

The idea of this tutorial is just simple is that creating a dramatic scene featuring a rocky mountainous place set in the dark scenic atmosphere which people may assume (just like I do hehe…) to be a hideout where vampires, ghosts or sorts of reside. So get yourself ready with your Photoshop CS3 or newer, a glass of tea or coffee, and….. a pack of cigarettes will be good companions. Let’s start!

Tutorial Resources

• Rocky Mountain – Pixabay
• Rocky cliff – Pixabay
• Rock Texture – Cgtextures
• Waterfall – Pixabay
• Castle – Pixabay
• Cloud and Moon – Pixabay
• Tree – Pixabay
• Tree – cgtextures
• Bridge – Pixabay
• Fairy House – mysticmorning
• frida4STOCK – fridagb

Step 1

Open Photoshop and start creating a new document in it by hitting Ctrl+N. Set the size of the document like the one shown in the screenshot below:

Firstly, I tried to map what I had in mind by creating gradual scratches about the scene I am going to create. Here it is:

Step 2

Well, make sure that we have downloaded all stocks in the stock list and save them on our computer. In this kind of photo manipulation, finding good stocks will be essential. Good and suitable stocks really will help us to execute the idea we have. In this early step, we will create the right composition of our scene. Open the stock image. Take the lasso tool in the tool panel and cut out the rock highlighted in red. I named this cut out rock 1

Step 3

Add the cut out to the main document. Take the free transform tool (Ctrl+T) and then scale its size. Place it in the left part of the document. Here is the screenshot for your inspiration.

Duplicate the rock 1 layer (Ctrl+J) and place the duplicate where needed as shown in the screenshot. Select all the rock layers and group them in one folder. I named this folder rock.

Step 4

Proceed to add another rock to fill the composition on the left of the scene. Open the other rock image and cut out the red highlighted part. I named this cut out left rock.

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