'Photoshop'

Software Used :

This piece is a typical example of how some of my personal work is created. It basically comes down to playing around with making custom brushes in Photoshop with, at most, a vague idea of what direction I want to go. I just love to be surprised by what comes out and leave the whole setup quite abstract at first, then slowly start to add detail. In this case I learned the power of leaving more and more elements out that didn’t contribute to the whole of the picture, while refining those areas that I felt were key to the composition.

The working title for this piece was originally “Mixer brushes 2” because it happened to be my second experiment with Photoshop’s Mixer brushes, which you can find in CS5. I just love the oily feel these give when you mix your colors “wet in wet”. So I got a bit carried away just sketching, combining these brushes with some custom ones I made earlier. I had no particular direction in mind, just playing, then reaching a point where suddenly it starts to look like something that could look like something. In this case it became a kind of gothic spaceship that reminds me a bit of Ryan Church’s style, unintentionally so (Fig.01).

From there I started searching: how can I put this shape into a believable landscape? The idea to make it seem huge appeared and I added some atmospheric haze in front of it. In the foreground I used three custom brushes to quickly put down some type of technological wasteland (Fig.02).