Project 2 Development: Concept Piece Refinement

    I spent a good portion of the day improving on the piece and it's almost, almost finished. I have tried to balance speed and detail with this to improve on my last pieces but I have been getting a good amount of advice and feedback from Simon and Emma Morley while I was working on this during open day. Though the mountain is still perhaps not perfect (I have Sunday to fix that), it is the only object that I think needs much more attention.

    I'm probably setting myself a real challenge with all these buildings but I aim to impress and I've always had that admiration for grand scopes. I had to look at a few images of sunrises to get the sky right, as well as looking to see how light interacts with clouds at such a low angle and while the sun still looks a little cartoonish (one thing I noticed in a lot of these images is that no matter the brightness and no matter at what point it was, the sun always had this white spot in the centre generated by the photons that straight-up enter your eye) I was more focused on the clouds which I didn't want to look too cotton-ball-puffy as that would probably have offset the current feel of the environment.

The way I work it also shouldn't be too hard to adapt this for a matte painting: Hide most of the forward layers, add a little more detail to the layers I have left, (of which there should only be about four or five), clean up the hidden parts, job done probably.