Sketchbook: Hexterian

Hexterian

Starting this thread to track my progress with doing environment works since it's a subject I would like to learn and improve on. 
CC and/or resources would be very much appreciated! 

artstation

Hexterian

So this one was started to test how much I know, and what I felt I was struggling with. My focus for this piece was creating a dramatically lit scene.


I wanted to try out something involving a temple or church. After some googling I came across different basilicas which I referenced for the main shape (St Peter's and San Marco).


Made a rough blockout with the aid of 3D and started placing things around. I then added a few elements for narrative/drama. I thought of cardinals and a figure, possibly a pope. 

I like the cliche of angel messengers, but I remembered an image of the Throne angel that I felt would fit the scene in a more surreal manner:


I didn't want to get lost in the details so I kept shapes fairly simple, and my canvas fully visible (little to no zooming).


I used a a rake and triangle texture brush to get some detail in to make things look less flat and clean. For the floor I used a floral mosaic and overlayed it lightly as a base.


Converted the floor piece to a sun and to hold my watermark. Added colors through more overlays and gradient map adjustment layers. The above is a merge of some of the overlays and with lighting and background turned off.

I didn't bother detailing stuff that went into shadow and kept things pretty blobby.


I added some reflections by just grabbing elements, flipping 'em and decreasing and erasing opacity.


Added fire effects to the Throne and scattered some of the warm tone of the flames around to the rest of the environment. It's mostly some blobs with inner/outer glow and motion blur.

And that led to the final result.

Some afterthoughts:
-Getting lighting right; I wanted something coming from a dome to illuminate a Pope but I kept getting the perspective on the casting on the floor and figures wrong (if that makes sense). It's something I will research more for the next piece.
-Zooming in; I have a bad habit of nitpicking, but I think I actually did fairly well in just looking at the big picture and keeping things simple. It also helped I set a time limit for myself of a couple of hours to research and finish the piece.

Hexterian

Some drafts for the recent Artstation challenge.

Picked the 3rd one and continued working on that 


Applied some color and lighting to see if it could go somewhere I liked 
Not entirely satisfied with it, so will be either discarding it or using it for a personal piece.

Then this week I also did a photobash with some old images I had laying around for a snowy western project:



Some overpaint here and there, especially the snow since that was non-existent in a lot of the mountain photos. Then finally some overlays with lighting since I worked mostly greyscale.

Next up I'm planning for a night scene, since I don't think I've ever touched that lighting/color situation, and maybe something more vertical in composition/format.