Shadows are everywhere, and we need to be careful when placing them. At first, I thought shadows were pretty simple, just add some black brushes behind some object and done. These past weeks I have been paying more and more attention to shadows and how they interact with objects and different layer, also is important to know when to use a harder shadow rather than a soft one. 

The image above is composed of 2 pictures. One of a gnome and one of a background. The first we need to know is that the shadows are darker when near the object and they get lighter when they are getting farther from the object. Next, I duplicate the layer and painted it black and by using distortion and skew I placed the shadow more or less where I wanted it. I applied a blur effect called Gaussian Blur (this blur is  for the shadow nearest to the object) and lower the opacity a little bit. I duplicated the shadow and for the part that is farther from the object I applied more blur and opacity. Finally, I created a clipping mask for the shadow that is farther from the object and created a gradian and painted on top of the clipping mask and adjusted until I thought it was good. Also after I was done with this I copy the clipping mask to the nearest shadow and inverted the gradian. This gave me the shadow effect on the image above. I found that when working with shadow you need to pay attention to the already existent shadows in the picture and use them as a guide, also see where the light is pointing at in the picture to also use that as a guide. 

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Here is another example: