I am a sci-fi fan and I like the appearance of space ships, with a strong perspective.  I decided to make a large ship hovering over the sea, and in the back of the painting I thought about adding a small, normal ship in order to achieve the correct proportions and to have a good visual impact.  I am happy with the final result because I worked on this piece with only a mouse, not with tablet, and it was all created in Photoshop.  For the colours, my inspiration came from classic painters, like Pieter Paul Rubens and Leonardo, and from the ‘Flamande’ painters such as Brueghel and Caravaggio.  For the spaceships, the classic sci-fi movies like Star Wars and Blade Runner, amongst others, inspired me.

To begin, I will explain how I started this piece.  To start, I chose a good, strong perspective – one to make the visual impact more clear (Fig01).

After the sketch was down, I moved on to work and started building the clouds (Fig02).  I used photographic textures of clouds and combined them to make something very atmospheric. 

I have presented the process of building the clouds.  For the first step, I had a photograph of part of some clouds; I cropped the photo in some parts and pieced what I had together.  The next step was to mix them to become just one part, using the Eraser tool, the Dodge tool and the Burn tool.  The result can be seen in Fig02, Fig03, Fig04 and Fig05.

For the sea and the rocks I used the very same technique as for the clouds.