DiDA D203 - Backdrop: Castle

I have a bigger version of this; but because I need to give dimensions, I thought the best idea was to use 300x210mm, the rough size for an A4 piece of paper. That's where this will be printed.

D203 is a graphics based ICT GCSE. Which is good. Everyone else in my class just Fireworked a sky and a ground together. Me, I Fireworked (my school has Photoshop for students taking graphics on the laptops; I didn't bother because a lot of graphics isn't computer based) and then Photoshopped, mainly on PS7, this.

I only have to do three backdrops, but my teacher said I had to do three. No complaining from me because I thought of three good backdrops.

First criticism; the castle being right next to the forest like that doesn't make sense. I think originally I was going to do water surrounding the castle: I didn't.

As normal; I drew it, scanned it and went over the lines in different layers in Photoshop. This is a bit different because this is a background. Usually I'll stick to the lines; and not even bother using more than one layer for the main thing. This needed to be layered because it has a closest to foreground system.

The castle (which the backdrop implies to be small) is a block of dark grey, embossed. I think I did some filter there. The stone-work also uses a filter; in addition to being embossed with a texture to give it that look. The entire door used to be one layer, but I took the stone and made that one layer, and the wood the other. Then I gave the stone the "stone-look", the wood, the "treated wood-look" and the metal door thing; that was gold, with adding lightning effects.

The forest was made by doing loads of trees; and then using perspective to make the ones that front bigger in both dimensions. They were coloured a brown, darker as it goes back, and had noise added to them to make them less flat. Later on I used the burn and dodge tool for extra coolness.

The tree-tops were just a layer behind the trees. Then I cut down the top of the trees to reveal the green stuff where it should be; then I filtered with sponge, then I made the bottom part much darker; then I used radial blur and the Sphere filter to make it not-flat, then I cut around the left half to separate it from the left of the green, and the same with the right: originally there wasn't that gap in the middle. -- It is also embossed.

The grass uses the ripple tool to make it more jumpy, before it was flat. The ground uses a tool to give it that look. I then made it darker as it goes in as one of the last things because I hadn't done it previously.

tl;dr: This is a backdrop for my D203 DiDA course.