Turning real places into fantasy locations

Original image

Turning it into dawn.

I decided to further my photo manipulation/ digital painting skills by painting directly ontop of an image. Here I chose an image of Durham to work from. Durham is already a historic, magical looking place, so I decided to exaggerate that by turning it into a fantasy, fictional kingdom.

I added in stars, the moon, shrouded in mist, hills, hot air balloons, I expanded Durham Cathedral into a castle, there are flying fish around the street lamps and there is a glistening frost covering the bridge and buildings.

While painting over this photo on Photoshop, I tried to limit my brushes that I used to see how far they could take me, because typically I would use many different kinds. In doing this I found myself taking alot longer to add in detail (the ice on the path and the detail on the trees) where I would normally do 1 stroke.

I like to think of this set in a frosty morning in December, where the moon sets and the sun comes up, reflecting all kinds of light onto a quiet village below an ancient castle. A few of the townsfolk are just starting to wake up and begin their day and the fish steal the rest of the light from the lamps.

I did a second piece here. To steer away from doing places near me, I decided to go onto maps, and drop myself into any location in the world. I ending up on a highway in Japan with seemingly nothing on it, however I travelled up the road a little and found a small house, sitting by itself. As if by fate, it had all the makings of a good concept!

Original image

I edited lighting, aged the house

This final version reminds me of the realm artwork. My inspiration for this was a futuristic yet overgrown place, somewhere between sci fi technology and nature. I mixed the ancient earthy Japanese structures with some overgrown metal from something. I also added in some more plants and a small pond. The power lines are covered in mossy vines too.

The story here could be a spaceship crashed some years ago and the pilot has been living in this small hut. He took parts of his ship and added them to the house, perhaps to function as a power source.

Reflection

After gaining some feedback from my tutors, they suggest I include my own story and create concept art for that.

To do this I would like to find some more artists and look into character design as well.

Here are some places to start:

Noah Bradley
Darek Zabrocki
Claire Hummel

Johannes Helgeson

Dave Rapoza

Shiyoon Kim

andrea blasich - clay

Wlop

Viktoria gavrilenko
http://characterdesign.blogspot.com/

ideas?

Interior of college aged and plantified

Designdoll

Photos people- into cartoon expressions
https://www.nathanfowkes.com/movie-art.html

http://www.dvoart.com/final-space

https://imgur.com/gallery/CyLa9

This has made me think about including a story with my art. I enjoy thinking about why things look the ways they do and how certain things got in the state they are in.