How I work

I thought I would share a little bit about how I have established my work set up when creating a new piece.
A few days ago I saw this photograph on a website called reddit:

I really liked the image and it got the old imagination spinning.

As I have not really done any environmental art yet, I decided this would be a good image to use as inspiration for a new piece.

I open the photo in photoshop, but the DPI up to 300 and set to work painting my interpretation of the image.

This is a screenshot I have taken about 2 hours into the project. The psd is split into three layers,  a layer of the source image, which I placed to the left. A canvas layer, which is pretty much the entire painting one one layer, and a detail layer, to sharpen up the edges and work in any details I have missed on the canvas layer.

In the bottom right of the screen I have blown up the image to full resolution to show what it looks like. Very messy. Zoomed out however it gives me a good enough idea of how the piece is going to look when the image is compressed down.

Now I've got the base image established, I will go back to the image and work in the details so it looks more reasonable at full resolution.

After this I want to add a few scenery elements that are not in the original source photograph, which is where the conceptual art side of things come in.

The thing I like about this project is that I have not used any colour sourcing from the original photograph, and come up with the palette by myself. This is something I will probably be doing more when I work from source imagery as I think it ends up looking more interesting.