A Pause in Swing by @Akumyo (Akumyo)
My half of the art trade with orena.deviantart.com
This was a BIG experiment. I used a combination of Photoshop 7 and OC v.3.02 plus to create it. I bounced in between the two programs when I wanted to use a certain tool that was unavailable in one or the other. The original base image was done in my sketchbook.
My backgrounds are getting a bit better, but not there yet. I never know how to create leaves properly. Any advice on those?
It definitely looks like you put alot of work into this piece! I love the coloring, especially the shading on the central figure and the pastels that you used for the sky. I also like the way that you drew the feathers, they look very fluffy.
As for the leaf problem, it's definitely next to impossible to draw every individual leaf, so your definitely on the right track with your decision to render them as a mass. I'd suggest that you make them abit darker though, maybe similar in coloring to the grass. It's also important to remember that tree leaves aren't a totally solid mass, there might be spots where the sky is showing through (the shading would be different in these areas too). You'd probably only want to actually draw individual leaves around the edges of the main bulk of leaves, and then they would basically look like diamond or triangular shapes (without the sharp edges).
Yup, so I'm not sure if that made any sense but hopefully it'll help. You are definitely on the right track, keep up the good work ^_^