The Raid

This is a Level 4 entry for the “3-D Fairytalke Challenge at .

Note: Is this image too large for your monitor? See my tutorial on Displaying Large Images on Small Monitors.

Required Stock

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Additional Stock

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Nagel Smoke Brushes

The Story

I like to create photo manipulations that capture an ambiguous moment. Make up your own story. Is this a brave Amazon attacking an evil troll? Or is it an ambitious mercenary interrupting a troll (and his pet fire drake) at supper?

The Making Of…

The hardest task was sorting through the available stock to create a cohesive piece. I finally just picked stock I liked and worried about how to assemble it later. The background I chose was the most interesting and yet the most challenging. It’s difficult to convincingly blend characters into the dark, dappled forest lighting in this scene.

I worked through several compositions and finally decided to create a panoramic work, using a pyramid composition to direct the eye.

I did a lot of work on each piece of stock. There are 23 layers in the main photoshop file, but it uses five “smart objects”, each of which contained numerous layers of their own. I’ll mention some highlights:

• Amazon warrior Since the scene was so dark, I turned the sword into a light source. This meant, of course, that I had to highlight the body to match. The figure casts two shadows, although that detail is a little too dark to see.


• Troll To make this character more “troll-like”, I removed his wings and tail. He came with a warm light shining from his left, so I had to add a fire to create a source for the light. The hand in front of the chest was hard to make out—I lightened his nails to help.


• Fire Drake He actually went through several different versions. Mostly, I darkened the skin to fit the scene, painted the mouth and added some motion blur to the wings.


• Camp fire The campfire was a fairly straight-forward addition, but it needs to cast a glow onto the surrounding area. I did my best and added some smoke.


• Deer This guy was a lot of work as I had to match him with the glow of the firelight.


• Everybody got the dappled light treatment, which involved tweaking a cloud render layer blended in overlay mode. Everybody also got a final color correction to integrate into the forest lighting.

This turned out to be a fun little exercise. I hope you enjoy it.