Earth Sky - Digital Illustration 2

Here is the second submission for the Digital Illustration series.

Acknowledgements and thanks are shown in the previous post.

Earth/Sky

The theme was inspired by the Genesis story day two, where he makes a firmament.  The photograph that I used in the background of the image, it is Traeth Llygwy on Anglesey .  I liked the balance of the land and the heavily clouded sky, how they are separated by the headland and the way the ripples on the beach travel at a contrasting angle.

In the story, God creates a firmament (a process of separating), which is the sky, to separate the waters from each other, these waters are heaven and the ocean.  As yet God hadn’t created the land.  In my interpretation however I am using the headland as the firmament.  The beach has it’s own ‘waves’ created by the ocean.  I think I am granted a little artistic license and hope purists will turn a blind eye to my inclusion of the land.

In this design I set a texture layer as the background.  I applied a warming photo filter and dry brush effect to the photograph, adding a gradient, overlayed, to enhance the colours in the sky, masking the headland so as to not affect it’s appearance. There were some posts also cut away from the horizon using the heal tool.

I sketched out some handrawn brush strokes around the headland, clouds and some of the beach ripples, these were blended with soft light layer option.  These are very subtle but accent some of the features without being too dramatic as there is a lot going on visually and I don’t want it to be too busy.

These elements were grouped and a mask was applied, inverted and then watercolour brushes were painted on to reveal the image.  The layer blending option was set to pass through allowing all the group layers to be actioned first and the composite is blended with the layer below, the texture, to create a stencil.  This makes it look like the brushes have washed away the sand and revealed the beach scene. 

I then used the pen tool to create some vector waves.  This new layer was blended with overlay.  I added a new layer and painted some translucent paint effects to look like there was watercolour painted ontop.

The next step was the addition of text, I chose a formal traditional font to reflect the formality and importance of the message.  To give it an aged, distressed appearance I rasterized the layer and added noise for texture, adjusted the levels and added paint splats to look as though water had been spilt on the ink.

I feel the image tells the story and really looks as though God is busy at work, creating his artistic masterpiece and splashing the waters about merrily.

Mark awarded = 73