'Photoshop'

I’d gotten far enough now that I needed to revisit the background and try to define what was really going on. The idea was Unicron destroys not only planets but whole solar systems. In this scene he is resting his hands on two dead planets and is sitting on a solidified sun that he has depleted. He is so big that he creates his own gravity, so debris would just move around him (Fig.08).

I actually used 3ds Max to help generate a throne. As I projected the model on the painting I realized that my perspective was off and my foreshortening didn't look right. I didn’t like the direction it was going. I got lazy with my fundamentals in the beginning and it came back to haunt me. Rather than attempt to fix the current illustration I decided to try to model some parts and see it if would give me different results. Again, since it wasn't for a client I saw this as an opportunity to get some practice in.

As you can see I'm not that good at modeling so I tried to get to a point that was good enough to start painting on top of (Fig.09).

I quickly painted over a render to see if this was the direction I wanted to go in. I then felt better about investing the time to actually finish this piece (Fig.10).

I applied textures similar to what I’d done on the first iteration. Bending and stretching textures on top of the render and then painting in lights and shadows (Fig.11).