It’s time to start treating the values a little more carefully. For example, I remove the darker bits from the horizon part. I often do this via a “Lighten” layer blending mode in Photoshop; this will only make stuff on your layer show up if it’s actually lighter than the colour below it. Also, I tweak the saturation of the orange part in the front a bit; right now that’s asking for too much of my attention.

Step 7 :

Now that I’ve made the lower left corner dark, I’m thinking it would be interesting to see if I can connect that part with the first big tower on the left. Also, I’ve put off experimenting with the actual cliff dwellings for far too long now. As I go along, I think about my focal point on the horizon. Right now, I’ve got about a dozen pixels at the horizon that look like Barad-Dur… it’s interesting to see what will become of that.

For composition balance, I add some space to the left side of the canvas.

Step 8 :

By now, there’s a few aspects of the painting that I like and a lot that I don’t, so I apply some major overhauls. First, I brighten the horizon significantly, and make things a lot more blue as they go farther away from camera. I want the towers to really stand out from the landscape. For some contrast in the foreground I add some lava flows. The blue atmosphere is going to have major impact on my sky colour as well, so I refine that too. I want to keep some of the warmer colours in there as they will contrast nicely with the blues.

I decide the horizon itself will be the focal point of the image, and I remove few pixels that suggested a tower in the distance.

Step 9 :

The towers stand out a little better now. However, since I added a lot more height differences to the horizon, it now looks much closer to camera than before. A very easy fix to restore the sense of distance is to simply ‘copy merged’ the entire horizon part, and squash it by scaling in vertically and non-uniformly by about 50%.

As for further changes, it’s all a matter of cleaning up here and there. The cliff dwellings themselves can do with a little refinement; I take care not to make them look too contemporary. When lights in the dark are ordered too regularly, I will look like a modern day city rather than a mysterious dwelling in an inhospitable world. I try to give the suggestion of water further in the distance a little more definition by reflecting the sky in it. Repeating a suggestion of towers as distance from camera increasing helps to sell the scale.

A very important step, I add about 10% of canvas to the bottom of the painting, this will help to sell the idea of the ridge leading the viewer into the painting. Finally, I add a simple suggestion of a lone protagonist in the foreground.

Step 10 :

When preparing the image for display on the web I always apply the sharpen filter once or twice, sometimes masking the effect in areas where it affects the image too much. For the high res work I use an unsharpen mask filter.

That’s it, hope that was helpful.

Jesse Van Dijk's CG Gallery Portfolio : cggallery.itsartmag.com/gallery/JessevanDijk/
Jesse Van Dijk's Website : www.jessevandijk.net