- Playing around with different layer modes and adjustment layers can lead to pretty nice results. After a little bit of experimenting i came up with a duplicate of the gradient layer set to Soft Light to get more saturation. I call up another layer and roughly block in some soft clouds with a small Chalk Brush set to very low opacity. A little bit of smudging helps to blend in the colors and creates a smoother look. No big deal huh? Keeping your layers as simple as possible is a good advice. Looking for a single layer in 230 layers because you want to erase a single thing is NO fun, i can tell you. I always keep it clearly arranged without merging too much so that fixing little things in the end is still an easy job. Digital Painting can be very flexible, so why not use its advantages.That`s how my layers look like:

- Now the real fun begins ! On a new layer, i begin to block in the main shapes of the buildings with different Chalk Brushes. Of course you could use other brushes as well, but i like how they give you rougher, somewhat random looking edges. I work from the background to the foreground and already implement some vague lighting/shading to the bigger structures. It is very important to have a back-, middle- and foreground in that kind of painting to get the impression of a three-dimensional space. The further an object is away from the viewer, the more it takes the color of the atmosphere/sky. The `buildings` are pretty much just random lines yet as i try to figure out their arrangement and scale. Notice the structure at the horizon next to the first vanishing point? They look insane huge and are supposed to be some kind of an eye-catcher. The human eye usually enters an image from the left side- that`s what i want in this image, assured by the vanishing point to the right. It would be kinda boring when the image abruptly `ends` with nothing at the point where the viewer`s eye stops at. It`s not supposed to be the main focus, more a little `tweak`. Not well executed here by all means. Just to sell the idea.

- Yay! More buildings! I move on to the foreground with darker colors and add some detail. Color corrected the whole thing a little by going into each layer and use Color Balance (Ctrl+B). An important thing is to vary the different buildings in size, shape etc. Huge cities aren`t built by one architect- there have been a lot of influences over hundreds or even thousands of years. We`ve just defined the basic shapes and silhouettes of our city, but already got some variation in architecture, form and arrangement of the buildings. Of course this could be done a lot better with a lot more designs and so on, but i just started into that stuff a little time ago and i don`t want to paint more than a few hours on this one.Whops, the little rivers are completely covered by buildings now. Anyways, maybe little rivers next time? Sorry.

3DTotal Advertisement - We need your support!

- Let the sun shine in! We`ve already cleared where the main light is coming from, so it`s not that hard to guess which sides of the buildings are lit by the sun. I don`t have much knowledge about lighting and shading (probably no good idea as an artist... but everyone needs to start somewhere. Picking up some books might be good to learn about such a complex subject, i do it myself). So what i do is brushing in some highlights and shadows, therewith developing the shapes further. A little `trick` is to use the layer where the buildings are blocked in, hit `Preserve Transparency` and paint in there so we don`t have to worry about being very accurate and paint outside the buildings. I use a hard round Brush along with the Chalk Brushes for the harder highlights and reflections on the windows, a soft round one to fade out the softer highlights and shadows. A very small (1-4px) Chalk Brush for all the tiny highlights such as roofs receiving some light.

- I`ve changed some things here and there like the giant structures in the backround and added a little bit of haze/atmosphere. Now we need to populate our `little` city! The best way is to add some windows, street lights and stuff like that, maybe some boats or flying things later. If we don`t want to paint every window itself which would take ages, we take advantage of some Brush settings, especially `spacing` and `color dynamics`. I mainly use two different rectangle Brushes i created along with Round- & Chalk Brushes. Just play a little with the spacing and other dynamics, it`s pretty powerful if you experiment a bit. As i see the painting in its small size here, i realize that some of the lights are looking somewhat strange, so i`am going to fix that. Remember always to zoom out and check your composition.

- I continue with the same process and add more city lights using different Custom Brushes which are very easy to create. The street lights were all done with the standard Photo shop Brushes, only adjusting some settings. I know the Perspective ism`t 100% accurate here; first painting in your windows/lights and than using `free transform-->perspective` can help you a lot if you watch at your Perspective Grid. What else have we been missing? Reflections, right?! I do it the easy and quick way here: Duplicate the layers with the city lights and buildings, flip them vertically and adjust via free transform (perspective) until they fit in. A little motion blur, then i go in and smudge with a strong, hard round Brush mostly from left to right. Adjusting the opacity/color helps to get a decent reflection. At the very end, i go through my layers again and play a little with them: Duplicating, color correcting and so on to get the best result. This is more of a trial-and- error process. Additionally, i fixed some little things in the background and the sky.

I guess we`re done for now. At this point, the painting took me around 4-5 hours to complete. The Tutorial about 20 hours... can`t see my dictionary anymore. I think that illustration does the job where it is- but now you could go on, size the whole thing up and start the real detailing, adding more population like spaceships and so on. In my eyes, this one is almost shouting for a planet in the background =) Well, i thank you very much for your interest and reading so far. I hope this little Insight into my Painting Process was at least a tiny bit helpful! Please bare with me because of spelling errors, i hope it wasn`t that terrible.

Page 1

Page 2