My first environmental digital painting!
This was done for a fan art contest over in hogwarts_elite where the prompt was to illustrate any location mentioned in the books. The only thing you couldn't do was use any characters (including statues and anyone's patronus). Here's mine:







That's at about 66%. The contest entry had to be 500x500 (50%). Since it was going to be seen at that resolution, I didn't tighten up a lot of areas and I didn't want to spend more time than I had to on it =B

A camping scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Originally I was going to illustrate Grindelwald's prison, but my sketches weren't that exciting, so I did this instead, not to mention it'd be easier to recognize. I titled it, "Camping, a.k.a. Playing Hobo," because that's what camping is to me. Pretending I'm homeless for a weekend isn't my idea of fun. Not yet, anyway.

I took time out of working on my portfolio to do this, but it was good practice for future pieces. It took all day, on and off, so I'm guessing it added up to about 8-9 hours. I really need to remind myself to take more breaks when digitally painting, ha ha ha. My eyes were like @_@



I'm going to pepper this with progress pics to break the rambling I do =p They don't coincide with what's written, so don't get confused if the the WIP doesn't matter match what I'm talking about, ha ha.



I don't know where I put it, but I did a few thumbnail sketches on a sheet of typing paper as a quick reference while I slapped down the basic colors and composition. There was going to be a little waterfall initially, but the birthday fan art for my friend had a little stream going through it, so I didn't want to repeat that again. Instead, I chose to have a dried out gorge where water could have been. I'm glad I went that way because I was trying to strike a balance between a magical forest and a place that felt somewhat dangerous, or at least mysterious.



Without any characters to set the stage for, I had to be more conscious of composition. I treated the tent as the focus and began layering and painting from there. A trick I learned from digital matter painters was to constantly flip your canvas horizontally to check your proportions and to catch errors you wouldn't normally see. What came from that was how the left side (right when flipped) felt like it was bearing down on the tent, which is what I wanted. If it was higher on the picture plane, it wouldn't feel like they were hiding out.



I added some rock in the extreme foreground so it felt like you were peeking down at them, which was a paranoia they had throughout that time. Layering and separating each plan (foreground, middleground, and background) was more a matter of little tweaks in color than anything. I wanted it to look very lush and wild, a place where people don't frolic and skip through while singing Disney songs.



I spent most of my time in the foreground area around the tent since it's supposed to be the focus. There's a lot more detail and richness in the color in that part than the others. The tent has the most saturated area of warm color, so along with the protective charm, it was easy for that to become the focus. I have to say that I'm particularly proud of how the fallen tree came out. The little steps behind it were originally its roots, but apparently I forgot and misread them as rough steps, ha ha ha. It works better that way, though, so it was one of those happy accidents. I knew in my thumbnail that I didn't want the eye to wander off, so I had that big tree on the far right there to guide you back in and around.



The foreground area to the left was a pain primarily because of that big rock structure. I wanted it to be multi-faceted like this picture I once saw (I forgot where the location was). It also added some visual contrast so that the whole thing wasn't grass, dirt, and trees, heh. The grassy area looked too bland, so I added that branch in there to break the monotony.



The middleground was an area that was given a lot of attention to make it "fit" in my eyes. I wanted it separate from the FG, but not drastically, so I messed with a lot of different cool color overlays. Towards the end I added some mist to help that separation. If I had more time, I would have moved that big tree in the middle to the left more since having something like that practically in the dead center isn't good composition. I liked how the rendering on it came out, though. There are a lot of trees around where I live, so my visual memory of the various crap on the trunks was pretty vivid, ha ha ha. Like the FG to the left, the grassy area in the MG was too boring, so I added in some mossy rocks and small plants.



The BG was easy. I roughed in a bunch of trees at the beginning and pretty much left them the way they were. They didn't need more detail since they were all the way in the back and atmospheric perspective would haze them out anyway. The moonlight shooting down was another way of separating the planes. They were dimmer at first, but when I decided to have the protective charms around the tent halfway through, I went back and punched them up. I didn't want them to attract too much attention, but since the charms were so bright I didn't have to worry about that anymore.



I also learned from digital matte painters to work globally, which means to work on the whole piece and jump around a lot rather than focusing on one area. Not only does this allow you to see how the entire illustration is evolving as a whole, it keeps morale high since you don't spend hours finishing one area only to see the rest of the piece still rough and messy. Towards the end it was just zooming in close with a small brush and doing all of those details. I created perhaps 7-9 custom brushes (I didn't use any pre-existing textures) for this illustration, then deleted them afterwards.





So, yeah, I guess that's about it! I'm sure there's more, but I'm also sure you're bored. Done completely in PS7. I should upgrade when I get the money, heh.