Exterior background progress

I believe I'm pretty much done with the exterior layout and background (finally).

As you can see, I began by scanning in my original background layout, then built up the different layers based on their position in relation to the camera (i.e. back railing on the lower layers and such). Once I had the outlines, I used a finer brush in Photoshop to draw out the details of the wood, giving the deck a more authentic effect. I dabbled in various methods of how to add the shady area's and eventually settled for using a normal brush with black and lowered the opacity levels of the brush strokes to around 7%, allowing me to build up the darker areas.