Desolation

As they always say, new year new me, right? Well in this case it's true. It actually took a couple of days to get this image created, but I think it looks spectacular! Honestly this is one of the most complicated images I've made so far, with over 60 layers and the help of a metal tutorial found here. There was a process to the whole thing though, and it started as a completely different idea. Below is the concept of what I was going to be creating.

I had the idea of making a metal circular structure which would be part of a machine, then put some lights on it and make it look old and worn. After having the idea in my head, I quickly drew up the concept art as shown above so that I can have some grounds on what I was going to do. I started working on the metal of the circular structure, which was made with the Clouds, Stitch, Motion Blur, Random Shape Fill, Relief, Color to Alpha, and Basic Adjustments effects. The layer blend modes used are Xor (which I've never used before), Multiply, and Additive. I then flattened that, copied it, new layer, and pasted it so that I can then use it there and for anything else I may need. I then added a brown color and blended it in with Overlay, so that it would have a nice color. I added gradient shadows and lighting and blurred it more with Gaussian Blur.

I then moved to the left wall, made the wall black initially, used Zoom/Rotate to give it some perspective, then used some of the metal texture layers to add an earthy look and blended all of those layers with Color Burn, Overlay, and Reflect. I then added a black gradient on top to make it look a bit more tube like on the left and blended it with Overlay, setting the opacity down a bit. On the right I did the same sort of thing, blending all of the layers with Multiply, Overlay, and Reflect, then adding shadows the same way as with the structure.

I then looked up an image of a silhouette of a person (since I'm not good at drawing people) and put it in at the front of the structure, added a darker gradient, and some colors for skin and clothing. I then added sand on the front with a brown color, some layer blend modes to make it look lighter and darker depending on where it was, and Noise to add texture. After all of that, the concept has become what you see below, which I call Desolation.

Wow, and I thought the Maleficent Dragon and Desert Landscape were difficult to do. I cranked those out in a few hours sure, but in one day. I took a few hours over the span of 2 or 3 days for this one. My poor little computer doesn't have the processing power, nor the RAM to make images like this, but it powered through. Hopefully I can make more images like this, but since this took a while, I may leave them for sometime in the future. I'll see you here later on, and I hope this is a Happy New Year for you.