The mottling on the ground is really neat! How'd you do it?

By tweaking the brush settings in photoshop.

First I selected an art brush. I believe it was a watercolor brush which was set up as dual-brush. Then I turned up the brush spacing and set some brush shape dynamics to rotate it and change it's roundness and jitter its position. Then under the color settings I told it to have some variation in the hue, purity, saturation, lightness, etc. Then I changed the flow rate on the brush so that it would have a more controlled stream of randomized shapes/colors coming out. Used the stylus and pressed gently for the distant shapes (making smaller splatters) and harder for the foreground to make larger texture.

In other words, a lot of fidgeting and fooling around.


You could also probably get a similar effect using the stained-glass filter but it would be a bit less controllable.