Once I was happy with the tonal range and colour of the whole piece it was time to start the rough, impressionistic details. My technique for rendering quickly and painterly involved using simple, round, hard brushes with the Opacity set to 50-70% for light, shadows, and additional surface details. Then I set a layer set to Overlay and pasted in appropriate textures for each material and buildings from my personal photographic library. Then, using a custom smudge brush (Fig05) with the Strength set to 100% and with the “all layers” option on, I painted on a new layer, allowing me to backtrack or erase my brush work if needed (Fig06). This part was definitely the most fun and proved to be very quick in achieving an impressionistic style.
Fig.05
Fig.06
Final Touches:
The entire image was completed using this process over and over again until it was done. The painting process took a little over 5 hours (Fig07a -c), with another 2 hours of additional tweaking and colour correction to create the final image.
Fig.07a
Fig.07b
Fig.07c
3DTotal
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Final Image
Hopefully this breakdown was helpful in driving into my thought process and techniques for realising and rendering a concept in a relatively quick amount of time.
