Now that I had the foreground elements blocked in I moved onto the most important aspect of the piece which was the city-like elements in the background. I continued with the abstract method of establishing the piece by blocking in selections with the Lasso tool. I then sampled some of the motion blurred background and darkened it (Fig.06). Now with a very loose idea of what I wanted I began to use a simple square brush to block in larger shapes, add textures and use the Warp tool to drop everything into perspective (Fig.07). Due to time restraints being imposed on this piece I also employed some photo reference as textures to quickly achieve some finer details this piece.




With a simple background base established I decided I needed a bit more overall depth. A quick way to achieve this was to simply copy all of the painted city elements and paste them into a new layer, lighten them, and then drop them a layer back (Fig.08). I then painted into certain areas and added some more elements to really lock in the depth. Since I had added a bit more depth, I now wanted to bring some of the city elements closer to the foreground. This also helps lead the eye from the foreground all the way to the background. I quickly blocked in a few shapes with a brush and then pasted in the previous detail to continue building the city out to the right (Fig.09) and the left (Fig.10) of the canvas. I also of course added the mandatory fantasy birds in the background for scale.




At this point in the process I stepped away from my computer, grabbed some snacks, ran some laps around the office and then came back to the painting to correct any issues I may have previously missed. After some slight polishing I decided this piece was ready for the pre-destruction phase of the shot. I've included a quick glimpse of the ‘post-destruction' painting after the dragon has flown through the image (Fig.11). Once again this was done with a mind-numbing amount of layers and effects, but in the end it all paid off when I got to see it in motion.