Homing

After the previous blog with the speed painting, I did some photo bashing. Wasn’t really good at photo bashing, never tried before.

It’s not great, but I was just messing around to learn the tools. I wanted a scene with giant bones in a desert, but it came out looking more like an animal carcass and didn’t have the huge, dramatic vibe I wanted. Oh well. I’m just practicing. I didn’t like the boring horizon at all, but I was mostly paying attention to the desert and sand. Photobashing helped a lot because there’s so much detail in those textures.

I tried another composition after that. This time I wanted to focus on rocks because I am not very good at them, and I figured photobashing would help me learn how to handle rocks better for future pieces. I switched everything to black and white to make the process easier. I also painted over some of the rocks on the left just to experiment a bit. I spent more time establishing the foreground, midground, and background so the image would feel more structured.

However, the composition was pretty rough, so I adjusted it a bit. Making the piece wider helped bring in more of the grand feeling I wanted and made everything feel larger. It still does not look great though, and I am not really enjoying the subject matter. I still want to return to the bones concept. Even so, this piece feels like it has some potential, so I decided to explore it more with the photobashing base I currently have.

Starting my final

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With what I had before, I went back to the bones concept. You can still see the small mountain range behind the triangle shapes, which was part of the earlier version. I liked it as a silhouette, so I kept it. The triangles were meant to be bones, but it was not obvious at all, so I changed them. This is what I get for not using references. I also refined the rocks so they would look less artificial after the photobashing. I never managed to get them to look exactly how I wanted, so I ended up painting my own in the end. Even so, I am glad I spent time on the photobashed rocks, because trying to make them work actually helped me get better at drawing rocks and making them feel believable, as you can see.

Press me for extra details

So I changed the triangles to something more bone like. I still was not happy with them though, because they lost the colossal and grand feeling I wanted for the scene. That was an important part of the image in my mind, and these shapes were not giving that impression. Also, I still get feedback that they don’t look like bones!

And so I changed the bones one last time and arrived at where I am now. The bones are photobashed in, and I added a fiery sandstorm moving across the composition to give it more movement. I also added a small figure for scale. There is a path between the figure and the bones, but it is a bit obscured right now. I will make this part better later. I want the path to look like it has been blown away, but when the deadline is due in only a few days (and as of writing this, it has already been three or four days since it was due) it is not really important.

Details

The background behind the bones is the same as before, just filled in quickly. Not much of it is going to be visible through the sandstorm anyway, so instead let us take a closer look at the bones.

After that, I transformed the bones and experimented with them until I was happy with how they looked and how well they fit into my environment.

After that I just painted over it.

Extra details

I did not really know where to begin with coloring. Even though I had had a color scheme in mind long before I started refining this piece, I just could not figure out how to put it down. My vision was for it to be orange and blue. It does not really make sense, but I imagined the sandstorm blowing through the bones as this dramatic blue, which I thought would look epic if I could pull it off and make it somehow work. Luckily, I do know how to use gradient maps, so I started experimenting with those.

To the right is what I ended up using to get the result you see above. After having this gradient as the base, I painted over some stronger blue to exaggerate the highlights and added some yellowy-orange to balance it out. I also used a darker blue-purple for the shadows in the darker areas so that the blue highlights would not feel out of place in such a warm composition. Basically, it was just to make it feel slightly cooler overall.

However, I did also have some other favourites from playing with gradient maps, as seen below.

I quite liked this version because of how misty and ethereal it looked. At one point, before I settled on the colors I ultimately chose, I was actually going with this one. However, it ended up being too abstract, which made it difficult to apply colors in a way that still made sense and remained readable. I also wanted the final piece to have a gritty texture, which contrasts with the ethereal look, so in the end, I did not use it.

I also had this version that I really liked, but it tended to flatten the darks and lights, bringing everything more “in the middle,” if that makes sense. I liked it partly for that reason, because that’s kind of how a sandstorm works. The particles blur everything together, almost like fog. However, that’s also why I ultimately didn’t choose it. Even though it matched my color scheme, it lacked the contrast of the previous version, and for a striking piece, it no longer felt visually engaging.

Feedbacks

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I was quite lucky to be surrounded by many people who could give me feedbacks for my piece. Let’s go through them.

The first feedback I got was from aaaj8614. They pointed out that the rocks on the sides created an upward movement toward the center, essentially framing everything. I had also established a perspective using some simple boxes, but the blue (bones) worked against it, making it look like they were coming toward the viewer rather than viewed from above, which is what the rocks suggested. The perspective should have been looking from below up, and this conflict also worked against the grand feeling I wanted to achieve.

There were a few different ways the bones could have been placed. The first one is basically one of the earlier designs I tried, but after all the feedback that nothing looked like bones, I was worried that without the “spine” in the middle (now buried in the sand), no one would recognize them as bones.

I think the rest of the compositions are mostly self-explanatory, so I am not going to say much about them.

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Another piece of feedback I got was from Luca. I had raised a point previously mentioned by aaaj8614, but instead of changing it, Luca suggested that if I simply shaded it as if it were being viewed from underneath, it would work fine. I gladly went with that, since I would much rather do that than redraw more bones.

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Klaus, my peer mentoring third year, also gave me feedback. They mainly pointed out that the rim light from the moon should show up more. This would help give more definition and shape to the bones, as well as to my basic shapes overall.

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Latifah from my class also gave me some advice.

“the red part idk if there was smthn that shouldve gone there but i feel like part of me imagines smthn to give scale comparison would be cool

the yellow blob could be darker for distance maybe not too much but just abit but if not it still looks fine

i also thought the light bouncing off the edge of the rocks on the left could be sharper to completly separate it from the bg since close up they seem to be merging in tgther

path? (this could be in progress so dont mind this if its not done)

the circle in blue i put bc i thought the skeletal structure cut off a little abruptly asnd thought just a liiiiiittle continuation in a light colour would make it complete

no clue whats going on in the bg”

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And that’s it for feedback. Thank you for everyone’s inputs, I’ll colour the bone ivory at some point, and in general just focus more on it after my 3D project.