Rytis Sabaliauskas takes us through his creation process of After Great Flood in this mini-tutorial.

Sabaliauskas explains his obstacle with scale, the effect it had on his entire piece and how to overcome it. 

1. Sketch

"Civilization collapsed after a terrible event, but a new one is rising from its ashes"

In my case, civilization rose from water. I always loved legends and ancient history so for this contest I used a great flood story with some spice of imagination. I had a clear idea in my head of what I wanted to paint and I just couldn't make any more sketches, so I started with the first one. The idea was that people inhabited various places that were over water. In this case, coliseum ruins. One of the few ways to get food was by fishing, so the community heavily relied on it.

In this scene I showed quite some time has passed since the flood, people started run out of space to live but hopefully the flood was finally ending.

2. 3D BLOCKOUT

When I started the 3D process I faced a problem from my lack of experience. The scale of everything in the scene was too big, after a couple failed renders I finally got what I was looking for and I proceeded to the next step.

Here's a 3D scene from another angle. I added details only to the closest objectives to save time.

3. FIRST OVER-PAINT

After making the 3D scene I moved to sketching on top for render. I used layer filters, masks and cropping to match the perspective render. Afterward, I did some photobash to get the mood I was aiming for.

4. FIXING MISTAKES/DETAILING

As I mentioned, at the start I had problems with the scale. Sadly they haunted me all the way through but with photobash help I made houses and boats smaller. The scene felt quite open so I placed ruined wall in left the corner to give a more enclosed space feeling for the scene. One of mistakes I made in 3D was that I used a water image instead of real material so the shadows didn't get any reflection from water and the scene felt quite dark, so I had to give some light for shadows with over-paint.

5. FINAL IMAGE

The scale problems are back again, I placed a whole bunch of houses in the foregorund instead of one. Then I added elements to show that fisherman lives there like nets, more boats and fish cages (many people thought the cages were for torture, hehe..). I placed house ruins to give the feel of erosion. The main character boat felt quite small so I made an upgrade to a sailing boat to make him look more badass.

Moving to final touches, the legendary birds for scale to give that epic feel. The image flow felt wrong so I inverted canvas to give a more natural composition flow for the painting.

Finally, after some long struggles I finished my illustration. Like with every work, I felt that I made improvements in my skills but at the same time I saw how much there is still to learn.