Warm light in the frozen tundra

(Click for larger size)

First post, really excited. Anyway, last night I've been working on the image featured above. It began as the experimental image below in the winter of 2004 using Corel Painter. Added the foreground mountain some time in 2005, and had the motivation last night to experiment some more, which resulted in all the stuff in the background. In total, I would say it took 30hours to complete which spanned over 3 years. I made other pictures too of course, I simply got bored working on 1 image for more than a few hours.

I have to admit, the hardest thing in rendering landscapes, is capturing the sense of scale. Putting in a familiar building, or a human character always makes for a good reference point. But what to do when I can't have those in my scene? I might have to do the layout in 3D next time. Which reminds me of the techniques for an animated matte painting. Just think of a scene from Lord of the rings, or the dog fight sequence in Transformers, it's simply a painting/photograph, except you can move the camera around, yeah... maybe in the future I'd have something worthy to try out that technique.

Another problem I'm also having, very minor though, is switching back and forth between Painter and Photoshop. It's kind of messing with my memory of the shortcut keys and workflow.

Corel Painter - ctrl + alt + drag to resize brush
Adobe Photoshop - [ or ] to resize brush

BTW, the image contained in the banner is mostly complete, so that'll be coming soon.

(Here's the crap version from 2004)