Now that I have the two temple mounts laid out in the correct perspective and all, I can’t very well follow through with my plan to make the luscious lady in the foreground the focal point of the picture. She’d loom like a giant over the ruins and cover up almost the entire temple complex in the background. As much as I was looking forward to painting a large female derriere in foreground, sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. This damsel will have to occupy the lower right portion of the picture plane from now on. (I’m sure she won’t mind. She is an Amazon, after all. She’s her own boss!)
For some reason, I always envisioned pink clouds in the background. I knew from the outset that I wanted to see clouds seared by the gleaming pink of a morning sun. I don’t know why. But I do know that I didn’t want to spray paint the pink using Photoshop tools. I wanted honest-to-goodness photographic pink. The kind of pink no one could possibly object to because I would be borrowing it directly from nature’s palette. Plus I was too lazy to paint the sky from scratch. So, I combined a couple of different sky photos – one I got off an internet search and one I took myself with a digital cameral right outside my office window. I put a blue, cloudy sky on the bottom with semi-transparent layers of pink-ness on top. I don’t remember why I cloned the water over top of the lighthouse. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time…
Ah, so that’s why I wanted to see the waterline in the background – to make sure that the clouds were situated on the exact same horizon line inherent in the SketchUp render. Probably more trouble than it was worth, but I did want to be sure that the clouds near the horizon were markedly smaller/further away than the clouds on top. This is also the stage at which I took a large soft airbrush tool (in Photoshop) and started painting large swaths of dark blue near the top of the picture. Since this illustration is going to be used as a book cover, I needed to leave lots of room for a lengthy book title near the top.
