I took this early spring forest picture (P_08) in January some 30 minutes from my house.

As experience shows, it makes a wonderful dirt-map, when set to 'greyscale' and alter the 'levels'. This has been used many times in the scene.

To give the textures more structure, I duplicated the layers, used the 'Emboss' Filter and set them to 'Overlay' so that now, all the surfaces have gained some bump.

I seldom made a separate Bump or Specular Map, most times the colour maps did there job well in all slots I wanted them.

Some words about the shading: There are nearly no objects with standard speculars in the scene. I prefer using a Shadow Light Falloff in the Reflection Slot. The highlights become much more controllable and plastic by that.

Lets talk about the Bird. Again a very simple Job, but if you know exactly, that you will never animate your scene, rework it with PS anyway. You can save so much time when questioning, How much work is really necessary? Based on a Photograph from the Internet, I modelled the rough shape and finally used the Picture scarcely edited as a texture and planar mapped it from the side. Some bones and skinning gave me freedom to define the exact posture of the throat and head.

The canvas in the lower left corner was a special thing to do. Originally I intended to create a naturalistic 'oil painting', but later I wondered, if the contrast to the rest of the rendering would be recognizable enough. Cubism would have taken too much time, so I decided to use the 'Miro' Style. With the 'pen' tool and some custom brushes the creation was done in one or two hours.