I won the competition over at the Leaky Cauldron (yay!), so I wanted to post some process work to show how I built the illustration from the bottom up. Below is the breakdown
First, I blocked out the scene using a big soft brush to plan the overall layout.
Next, I added the sky and water. For the sky I used a series of rough, pastel brushes combined with some soft brushes for shadows and some watercolor brushes for details and complexity.
For the water I made a custom brush using a photographic reference. I painted over the highlights of the water, converted to B&W and assigned it as a Photoshop brush.
The sun rays were achieved by merging filtering a layer with “Difference Clouds” and merging it with a layer that I ran the “Add Noise” filter to. I then applied a zoom blur to the merged layer, changed blend mode to screen, and moved and masked it till it looked good.
Here I added the mountains in the background. This was a long process, but was worth it. I made 3 or 4 mountains and scaled and masked them to fit together, then added more and more detail and contrast with a rough pastel brush. I quickly rendered a beach and a background, then painted the trees on top.
I duplicated the previous sun rays layer, scaled it up, and blurred it to add some subtle sun beams in the foreground. For the fog, I duplicated the background clouds layer, tweaked the curves, tweaked the mask and changed the blend mode to screen.
Finally, I added my color correction layers. I added a couple color fill layers at 90% fill and masked them out in certain areas so some of the colors came through. I also added a curves adjustment layer, and added another scanned paper layer over the dragon for more details.
For the overall paper effect, I used different scanned paper images and used multiply and color burn to create a coppery, aged parchment look. I also did an overall noise filter so the different parts would feel more cohesive. Then I just added the text, using some watercolor brushes to give some texture. THAT’S IT!
