Photoshop
Twin Towers
Alex Ruiz is one of my favorite modern day artists. He’s got some really great visions and artworks that really cater to my SciFi nerve. I am a huge fan of the genre and he really takes it to the next level. His Shantytown pic really caught my eye; so I thought I’d take on a play of it.
I manually created similar brushes to the ones he used to build up the background. I set the flow and opacity of them both to 15 and 20 and slowly built up the background using layers (about 130 of them). Slowly would take out portions with the eraser and build back up to give it depth.
My uncropped version of the pic is actually really large (5000×5000) because I started out small, but the layers kept growing and not really turning out how I wanted them, so I would expand the canvas (about 5 or 6 times) until I liked what I saw… (more…)
Across The Sand
This tut was actually a pretty interesting one to dig into. It brought me back a lot to the abstract days of kicking around the studio art degree at Whitman; it gives you a lot more creative challenges.
A couple of net adds I think that enhanced it were a few background textures to make it more 3d, I darkened the sky, added a few more clouds, tossed in lightening, reduced the amount of rain and ultimately kept some color in it. 
