Sci-fi Environment Conceptby Björn Wirtz Web: www.derwolpertinger.de


6. It‘s time for a new spaceship now. The new one is a lot bigger than the crappy old one to add more depth to the whole scene. I‘ve tried to create some really unique design here, combining soft curves with hard edges but i‘ve always paid close attention to stay within the previously defined form language.



7. In this step I have made some more or less subtle local value adjustments to get things more seperated from each other. For example the sky was just a bit too dull for such a brightly lit scene. You can also see some new interestingly shaped buildings here that serve as midground elements. One important thing to remember is to place light objects against dark backgrounds and vice versa. It is best to create a rythm throughout your image from foreground to background in order to achieve the greatest depth effect. So place light against dar, then dark against light and so on. But keep in mind that every rule is there to be broken, don‘t blindly stick to them and only use them when there is a reason for that. Some other simple effect I have also used here to seperate objects from each other are... special effects“ like smoke and haze.

8. The painting is really coming to life now. The main reason for that are the hundreds of tiny lights that I have added here. They give another sense of scale and make the scene look just more huge now. The creation of these lights was rather simple. I‘ve searched for some night city photos in my personal photo archive, then placed several different ones over the painting, setting the layer mode to screen and adjusting the levels only left the lights to be visible. After that it was just a matter of deleting and cloning some lights to get to the final result. It‘s a great way of quickly increasing the level of detail in a painting.



9. Now it comes to some fine tuning. A lot of lines in the scene where just to straight and therefore killing the sense of huge scale. I‘ve broken these lines, for example on the air bridges, by sketching in some tiny architectural shapes. Otherwise i‘ve enhanced the separation of building layers to create more depth by selecting a building layer with the lasso tool and then painting over it with a bright colour at a low opacity. This is also a good method to create ground fog.



10. It‘s polishing time now. Looking at the painting i‘ve decided that the top part is really unnecessary and can be copped out, so viewer can better focus on the spaceships in the foreground and the city architecture. I‘ve also made some subtle tonal and color changes with color balance and curve adjustments layers. Finally the reddish glow effect was added to the top right corner by creating a new layer set to soft light. Then a simple radial gradient from red to transparent was added at the right place. This gives the feeling of the sun shining through and illuminating the particles in the air.  



That‘s it for now. I hope you found it useful in some way and can apply some of the tips I gave you in your own painting process. Have fun!

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