Concept Development - Photograph Paint Over

Paint overs are a quick and easy way to put together a nice composition and make it your own. This technique can be used to produce design thumbnails for concept art. When a concept artist is starting out, they can use this technique to experiment and study the effects of lighting in a scene.

For this task I chose these two images and created a composite from
them. I wanted it to appear as if the futuristic building was located on a Martian landscape.

First I composited the images together, altering the perspective of the building so that it better suited the environment. The perspective of images can be edited using the free transform tool. Obviously I could not get the perspective exactly right, hiding the base of the building helped to fake a better perspective for the image.

Block colours were added on separate layers, allowing me to go back and alter the colours individually if necessary. This also helped to distinguish between foreground, midground and background. This composition fits quite nicely into the rule of thirds.

Using a dark gray colour on a multiply layer, with a custom watercolour brush, allowed me to build up the detail of the image. For this I pushed the layer with the composite to the top and set it to a low opacity. This gave me the ability to follow the dark areas of the photograph when painting the detail. A soft light layer was added, filling in some of the highlight detail for the image.

Finally I used my custom cloud brush to add clouds in the sky. Having a custom brush for this specific purpose made the task fast and simple. Overall I believe that the digital paint is successful in conveying the details of the image, it would require a lot more work to bring it up to a professional standard however. Perhaps if I increased the contrast in the image things would improve slightly.