Painting An Atmospheric Sci-Fi Scene

CG student Morten Solgaard Pedersen takes you through his process for constructing an atmospheric sci-fi painting.

- Morten Solgaard Pedersen

Find out how to color match textures…

In this making of I will talk about my process – from initial thumbnail to fully rendered final image. Some of these steps are crucial and something that I will always do, others are specific to this painting; no painting is approached in the exact same way. I will go through the most important parts of the process and focus on the most useful techniques, including matching the colors and values of a photo to my work, and how to design a painting like this. I will do my best to explain my decisions and thought processes; in my experience tools and techniques can only take you so far, you need to know theory as well.

01 Thumbnail and color: The first and probably most crucial part of creating any piece is exploration and thumbnailing. My idea for this piece was to convey a feeling of arriving at an unfamiliar place in the early morning. With that in mind I drew several quick sketches focusing on the composition rather than working on the building and character designs; getting the values, mood, and colors right according to my concept is more important. Basically if it will affect the final image I wanted to get it figured out now rather than at a later stage, there is no point moving forward with something that doesn’t work.

To speed things up I took a photograph of a sunset and used it as the basis for the environment, it helped to set the lighting conditions of the whole piece and will make future steps easier to get right. It is very important to look up references for every part of your work, whether this is the mood, design, or setting. Guessing will not do you any favors unless you are very experience, and have a large amount of mental references.