The following article is a short making of "Fantasy View of Budapest” and is most useful for those who already have an intermediate or advanced knowledge of Photoshop. Note that this is not a PS tutorial but a walkthrough of the creative process containing the main steps of my workflow which hopefully inspires other artists.

The concept was inspired by an old game I played when I used to cross one of the bridges of the city. I'd look at the astonishing view and try to imagine different kinds of variations of the landscape in front of me. My illustration is one
of these visions.

1. Creating the base of the image. The major part of the process is slow and requires great attention to details, so you can easily get lost if you're not careful.


Two references for the dried out river bed.


The rough base of the image (lower part distorted for correct perspective).



Defining the final look of the river bed. I had to repaint all the rocky parts, because there were missing areas (big grey parts in the previous image) and the topology had to be rebuilt because of Margit Island in the middle of the basin. I used the final color palette here.