Textures

The textures for the skydome - they're on two separate spheres so I could meddle with them as I chose.

Final Matte Painting

And the final matte painting! I'm pretty pleased with it, another hour of detailing probably wouldn't hurt the rock but other than that I think it's finished.

Final Render

The final rendered image - not sure why one side of the sky is darker than the other, but I fixed it in Photoshop on the final painting. I tried to apply an ocean shader to the water, but after hours of fighting with it to get it looking not-horribly-pixellated led me to just say 'stuff it'.

Skyscraper Model

The skyscraper is modelled! About halfway through making this I realised that I was actually making something in Maya and became disproportionately excited. Yes, it's more or less a cuboid with a cylinder attached, but it's my cuboid with a cylinder attached.

Concept Painting, Take Two

Fixed the sizing problem with the wave - as Phil and Tom pointed out, it would a tsunami if it was going to get that high up the cliff. Also touched up the rock and applied some fog to the top of the skyscraper to suggest that it's huge.

And a version with more fog, more refelcted light and some faint edge lighting. Not sure which one I prefer, I'll sleep on it and see how they look in the morning.

Concept Painting

I was terrified when I painted this. I deliberately wanted to keep it simple and have very few elements in the painting to enhance the sense of isolation and remove any context for the scene, but I couldn't shake the feeling of 'if I don't make this absurdly complicated and put insane detail into every little thing then they'll think I can't paint!' Getting past that feeling was what allowed me to make headway with it and start valuing the few elements involved rather than trying to fight the simplicity. I considered adding birds for scale, but decided that, once again, it needed to be a) completely isolated and b) completely context-free to work. I still want to go back and make the skyscraper complex and detailed, but I know that doing so would just detract from it.

Thumbnails, Yet Again

On Phil's advice I moved away from the post-apocalyptic theme, instead focussing on incongruous elements in everyday life. #28 is supposed to be a milk bottle at a fancy doorway, but it didn't work so it was scrapped pretty quickly. #26 turned out to be the catalyst for the rest of the images in the 'buildings where they do not belong' sense, while #29 got me thinking about skyscrapers.

More experimentation with skyscrapers where they do not belong. I'd been looking at a variety of photos of houses on cliffs and noticed that some of them used cliff stacks, i.e. tall pillars of rock where part of the cliff has fallen away and left a little bit standing out in the sea. There were three thumbnails looking at this, but muggins here forgot to save them so I'll redo them at some point.

Skyscraper designs. I considered making the skyscraper fancy and ornate, but eventually I realised that if I made the skyscraper 'special' and put it in a special location, the viewer wouldn't be hit as hard by it because 'oh hey, fancy skyscraper, fancy location, no problem'. The sheer generic-ness of the final design in the painting is what makes it uncanny.