Hello, I'm Edvige. Welcome to the Making of The Destroyer, which is an image done completely in Photoshop. This was a personal project where I just wanted to have fun with. I will be describing the painting process that I go through to create one of my concepts.

In this case my idea was to create something heavy, massive and menacing, like some big mechanical machine that looked like a mechanical spider. I thought to set the machine in a dusty environment with a dense atmosphere to give more sense of drama to the whole scene, so I started to fill the canvas with a light color to set the background tone, using a simple default Photoshop brush and beige and earthy tones from the color tablet. It's always good to consider the atmosphere of a scene at this stage as it will make the image stronger and more realistic.

Here we are on the most important step in the whole process. It is here that you define everything: composition, shapes, balance, angle etc (Fig.01 – 02).



As you can see I started with a classical centered composition, which concentrates the view onto the most important object: the Destroyer. Notice the proportions: the robot silhouette is filling almost all the canvas space available, which makes the subject even bigger.

I really wanted to work quickly so after I'd established the general values I started to have fun with Photoshop's other brushes to better define all the machine and the other objects in the scene, like the burned machine relic. I have hundreds of brushes, but basically I always use the same bunch of favorites. Some of them have interesting textures that can, sometimes, naturally generate three-dimensional effects.

Another relevant aspect I needed to consider was the sense of depth, otherwise the objects in my scene would seem too flat. By simply adding a big arm of the spider in the foreground I rapidly obtained that feeling of depth and values did the rest (Fig.03).