I was browsing Reddit one day in the summer of 2021 and came across a picture of a tree on top of Daedunsan Mountain in South Korea, relatively close to where my dad grew up. I had an idea to do a simple drawing of the tree and surrounding landscape to get practice with my new Wacom but wanted to replace the leaves with clouds based on some art I’d seen recently using a similar practice of replacing certain natural elements with others.

To start, I drew the basic outlines of the tree and surrounding landscape, before following up with some smaller details on the tree, stones, and grass. The majority of the creativity came in when I moved the image over to photoshop. I inverted the colors to make the clouds pop, since they would be primarily light. I applied a light notebook paper texture to the image as well and got started fitting the different clouds in place amongst the canopy of the tree. I used some masks to more precisely paint out certain bits of the branches or clouds to achieve the look of the branches going through the clouds like they would amongst other leaves.