Friday 6 April 2012

Digital Sketch: Gateway

After seeing and reading how people manage to make a digital concept in a few hours, or a day or two, I have decided to give this kind of exercise a go and set myself a given amount of time to start and finish something. So whenever I have the time, I will make one of these and see what comes out. I will be putting here these so called sketches. 


This one you see on this post has taken me about 4 hours. It started as a landscape concept, but I ended up cutting it as you see it now. I started by making a whole bunch of shapes with the lasso tool. Then I just filled them in with a brush at different opacities and values of black. I did not have anything particular in mind when I started. At some point I saw what looked like a gate between two of the tree shapes. That's when I decided to be less ambitious with my original landscape idea and simply cut that part out from the full image and work on it. 


Once I had the shapes and the image cropped, I started defining the shapes.  To start with, I worked in black and white, for me is easier in order to stablish the tonal range of the image. Then I used quite a few layers set in Color mode to start testing colour schemes in the image. I also used several Hue/Saturation adjustment layers in between the Color mode layers to mainly played with the hues until I found a colour scheme I liked. For this first image I used the opportunity to play a bit with the brushes I have in my folders, hence all the shapes you can see across the image. To end, I used several photos to give the trees and ground some texture. Normally I don't leave the photos as they are, I set them in Overlay/Soft Light  mode (depends), click on the Lock Transparent Pixels icon for that layer, and paint over it with a textured brush. That way you don't just have the image sitting just there, but your version of the image, which I find fits better. Last, I did the light coming from the gate. To made it,  I simple drew an ellipse in a separate layer set above everything else, motion blur it, and set the layer to Soft Light to finish.


Any questions or comments are always welcomed.

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