I kept the basic background as a base for my lighting, tweaking it to make it match what was being added at the scene at that point. I used a transparent mask to know where my main character was, so I don’t overwork the background right behind him when sketching and blocking the new elements. Here are some key steps through the process of the background compositing:
What´s fantastic about digital painting is that one can do and undo, and mix layers as much as one´d like. At this point, I reckoned the composition was quite balanced, the characters were interesting, but they weren´t in the same imaginary scene! They looked like stickers one over the others. I was in need to blend everything together... through lighting and fx´s like smokes and reflections.
My main charachter was originally created over a fair background, and now he´s standing up front a massive dark area, while the station chief was almost invisible because of the same reason. It´s not the case of my heroine thanks to that some basic mist had been added to the scene to give some feeling of depth. This same trick, along with some more lighting tweaking (photoshop overlay option for both brushes and layers are really useful, plus the right hue and intensity) and smokes were to “lift up” each character, defining all their shapes and getting all the elements together. The dramatic effect of some highlights on certain surfaces or along some character edges worked pretty well too.
To finish this picture, I painted the shadow of someone who’s taking a picture of my hero, for both to let the viewer imagine that the scene didn’t end in its framing and to balance better the whole composition.
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