I then painted in the banners and advertisements. They're very bright and saturated, as advertisers will want their name to be clearly visible, so they're probably lit – either from behind or by spotlights. To maintain the sense of scale and perspective it's important to make sure the density of strokes increase and the boards get farther away from camera (Fig.06).
Fig.06
I also wanted to add some spotlights. I grabbed a reference picture (Fig.07), increased the contrast so only the lights themselves stood out from the black, and placed it in my painting. When I set the layer blending mode to 'Screen' I only had the spots stand out (Fig.08).
Fig.07
Fig.08
The idea was nice, but their positioning wasn’t entirely to my liking. I scaled them down to increase the sense of scale, and that worked for me. Next, I used the same technique to add big spotlights on top of the stadium. I flattened my image and brushed over the lights with my brush in 'Colour Dodge' blending mode. I did the same for certain spots in the audience – I needed some very saturated spots of colour here and there. I made sure none of them really caught the eye by themselves. I also directly copied and pasted the scoreboard from the reference image I used earlier, and placed it in Screen blending mode in the painting. The last step was a bit of detailing: suggestions of players on the pitch, cables across the sky, and so on. Here’s how it looked (Fig.09).
Fig.09
Almost there! I thought the image still felt a bit cramped, claustrophobic, and was not dynamic enough even at this stage. I tried scaling it down non-uniformly down the vertical axis, and also skewed it a bit and that seemed to work (Fig.10).
Fig.10
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To prepare it for publication on the net I scale it down to 1200 pixels wide, and I applied the Sharpen filter twice to make all the details ‘pop’ (Fig.11).
Fig.11 - Final Image - Click image to download free brush
And that's it! I hope you’ve learned something from the above steps, or at least enjoyed the read! Please feel free to drop me an email (www.jessevandijk.net/contact.html) if you'd like to contact me.
