Update and Progress Shots

Back in Malaysia and painting during sem break. 

Medieval Market

Been motivated by doing something with markets. So here's a quick one on a medieval kind of market.

Black Market City

Then I told to myself, let's do something similar but change the era to more, modern futuristic. I also wanted to push the painting further compared to the medieval market. In the end this was and is a challenge, painting cities and getting the feel of a bustling one is something unfamiliar to me, so this was really a good practice. Below is the progress.

Started out with a rough sketch, the lines are quite wobbly. =/

Blocked in some values, along with some awful choices of color.

Desaturated the colors, and added some lights and details to get the feel.

Added more lights and some signs.

Adding more details.

Making the buildings tighter with details, used some photographs to create the light texture. Fixing the wobbly parts by straightening the edges and adding light effects.

A little bit more detailing and adjustments, extracted some windows from textures and pasted them here and there... and done!

Giant Elephant Pirates

I feel that my biggest weakness so far are scale, and controlling my foreground, mid ground and background. Most of the time I like to squeeze my subject matter in the entire canvas, which probably kills the composition in most cases. So my objective for this image was clear, present scale and distance.

Rough silhouette of elephants and environment, both in different layers.

Adding some values on the elephants.

Painting clouds, used a panorama sky photograph and painted over it. Mainly borrowed values from there and painted clouds according to my perspective, to achieve the feel that the vanishing point of the clouds are at the main city.

Darkened the elephants to pop them out more and added minor details here and there.

Before this was doing for a local day kind of feel, then decided to go for dusk. Just felt that a warmer mood is more suitable. Huge jump in detailing the elephants, still working on them in grayscale.

Added some reddish purple farther away it got from the city, to suggest that the sun going down from behind the main city. Also added foreground buildings to further push the scale.

Gave the blooming effect from where the sun is setting, and toned down the texture of the clouds as it looked  too artificial and distracting.

Added some occlusion effect on the elephants, and painted some colors in.

Added the effects and extra details such as the chain, ray of lights shooting out from behind the city. Also refined the floor by giving it some depth. Also overlayed some elephant skin texture on the elephant in front, at about 20~30% opacity.

Added more effects such as disturbed sand or distant /environment fog to differentiate what is in front or behind and dust flying cause of the elephant's foot's impact. Did a bit of cleaning up and defining the city behind.

That's it for now, hope you enjoyed this update.

More to come. =)