My Fantasy Environment Painting

Today I will share with you how and why I made this painting with many pictures.

Here is the short version: Fantasy Painting- The Short Version

I made it a couple of years ago when I was learning full time how to draw. I did many photo studies and design exercises.

I had joined a tiny 100 days studies art group. We were less than 7 people in the group and we were all at different skills levels. The purpose was to motivate and inspire each other to keep drawing and learning new things.

This painting took me a week to complete and over 16 hours of just painting.

Day 1- Silhouettes

I began by collecting references for this project. I decided to pain a fantasy landscape inspired by Asian culture. I live in Europe and have never visited Asia. The Asian traditional architecture and landscapes look very magical to me.

When I collect reference I try to study it, to get a better understanding. After studying a few buildings as silhouettes I tried to make a few of my own and picked one to continue working on. Usually the first drawings are generic as it takes a few tries to get creative.

This step took me a bit more than 2 hours.

Day 2- Perspective

I figured out how to put the silhouettes into perspective. There are some mistakes, but I was satisfied with the progress. I also made a few thumbnails to imagine how the scene would look like. Thanks to Feng Zhu and his Youtube tutorials "Design Cinema" I learned faster how to do concepts and design. The tutorials are free and truly amazing.

Day 3- Values

This day was a bit less successful, but progress is progress. Just have to keep trying.

Day 4- Line Art

Here I spent 3:30h just on line work and details. And spent 30 mins deciding how the values of the painting would be.
Where is the light coming from?

Day 5- Photo Bashing

This is called "photo bashing"- using random, unrelated photographs to create a color theme. It is not recommended for beginners, but I had decided to try it out.

Final 3 results zoomed in

I spent nearly 2 hours on this. I really wanted to make a night scene as in the 3rd painting, but I felt like my skills were not strong enough. So I worked on the 1st scene.

Day 6- Big Details

I defined the color and composition, fixed some perspective issues. I spent 2:30 hours that day adding the big details.

Day 7- The Final Steps

I spent 6 more hours to finish this including some redo-s. Details take time and patience.

All The Steps

Thank you for reading!

Let me know if the post is too long or if you'd like to see more like this :D

Reminder: tomorrow is the first Dragon Art Contest!

If you enjoyed this please: