'Photoshop'

Making of 'City Of Angels'
by Frank Hong
 
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Software Used :

Photoshop


My name is Frank Hong and I’m a concept artist based in Toronto Canada.

The City of Angels matte painting was a personal piece I finished in 2009. It’s more of a spontaneous piece since I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted going into the process. As there wasn’t a brief, I was free to take the image
in any direction I wanted.

To create an environment, setting the right mood and atmosphere is, in my opinion, the most important part. It’s like giving personality to a character; it just needs to be there. In this case, I decided to create a sci-fi cityscape at dawn and to take advantage of the morning fog to get the cold and dead feeling I wanted.

In my research for the piece, I liked the looks of the not-so-perfect cityscape. Tall, old buildings and messy layouts spoke to me better than clean cut matchbox sci-fi. I wanted to use this contrast between the new and the old. I took
a reference image and horizontally copied it three times (Fig.01) making the connection almost seamless. This
filled the left part of the city base.

frank, hong, city, of, angels, digital, painting, city, landscape, environment, buildings, birds,
Fig.01

When I create a new image, I like to go through my research folder and decide which picture I am going to use for what. In this case I already had an idea of the picture that was going to fill the right side of the city. This was a great image that gave me a lot of reflections on roof tops and just the right amount of fog to separate the mid ground to background layers (Fig.02).

frank, hong, city, of, angels, digital, painting, city, landscape, environment, buildings, birds,
Fig.02



Joan_Of_Arc


I copied the silhouette of the background buildings over from the right side (Fig.03). Because there was such a difference in light direction in the two images I used, there was quite a bit of work to do to make them sit in the same image.

frank, hong, city, of, angels, digital, painting, city, landscape, environment, buildings, birds,
Fig.03

I wanted to find a good mood for the image and the green was starting to look a bit harsh to me. With a Color Balance adjustment layer, I was able to raise the red in the picture, and get something like this (Fig.04).

frank, hong, city, of, angels, digital, painting, city, landscape, environment, buildings, birds,
Fig.04

Next I looked for an image of the sky. Something like the one I found worked great because it matched the intensity of the light. The direction of the light source seemed to complement the city too (Fig.05).

frank, hong, city, of, angels, digital, painting, city, landscape, environment, buildings, birds,
Fig.05

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