Making of Journey Across the Desertby Daniel Romanovsky, Canada Web: www.formlanguage.net


With the landscape established it was time to block in the key elements of the composition. Before starting work on the bones, I studied some pictures of whale skeletons to give me a basic idea of the type of iconography I need. While I wasn’t trying depict any specific creature, I still wanted the skeleton to look plausible. I used a solid opaque color and a smaller brush to lay in the silhouette, making the bones wrap the terrain in an S curve. It took a number of attempts before I was satisfied with the overall shape. Even though bones are a very organic form, it’s still crucial to adhere to the rules of linear perspective, in order to create the illusion of form in space. The camel rider was painted in the same fashion, starting with the silhouette shape and then adding the lights and darks.


Once I was satisfied with the overall composition, it was time to work out the bones. Since I was pleased with how my initial lay-in turned out, the overall silhouette did not change very much from start to finish. The main challenge here was getting the foreshortening to read correctly.




At this point everything was starting to come together. I finalized the clouds and the camel rider, tweaking him until the scale between him and the skeleton was just right. I added an atmosphere layer using a soft cloud brush loaded with my background color. This helped reinforce my depth cues pushing the background information into the distance.




The last major step was to finish painting and detailing the landscape, I made sure to turn off all the unnecessary layers while painting. I used a lot of particle brushes to get the right effect. Achieving a realistic look, is a matter of studying at a lot of reference material, getting the colors, values and edges right during the lay-in stage and then zooming into specific areas and adding information locally.