This image was made for ‘The Lost World' challenge. I think a hidden city is a lost world, and so I created one on an island – a city hidden by big rocks. I also wanted to feature a ship discovering the place.

Step One

I started from a sketch to figure out how the composition of the image should look.


When I was satisfied with the sketch, I started work, building up the clouds. I used photo textures of clouds and I combined them to create something which I feel is very atmospheric.

Step Two

I started adding elements, like the water, rocks, buildings and so on, and I also used a small photographic texture combined to build the whole composition. The process was not so simple though because every layer had a different colour. To fix this, I used the Color Balance and Hue Saturation tools. I made a lot of layers with colour passes, and a painted fog was added to give the sensation of depth. But still, at this point more work was needed on the lighting and atmosphere.

Step Three

I then started work on the lighting and atmosphere. I started to create the haze and the accent of the light in the mood. The overall image then started to look close to what I wanted. So it was then time to add in the elements in order to bring the composition to life.

Step Four

I built the two airships from photographic parts of a force aeroplane and helicopter, along with a metal texture, which gave me a good result [see image below].



I also created some birds, which were painted photographs to look more pictorial.




Finally, here is the final image [see image below].


Thank you very much for reading this Making Of; I hope you will find it useful and learn from this making of one or two tricks. If you have any questions, suggestions or critiques, please feel free to drop me a line to at:
a_baluta@yahoo.com.

Many thanks once again.

Adrian Baluta