Jesper Friis is the artist behind 'Dormant Giants' a finalist in the Worlds Challenge. In this tutorial he takes us through the creation of the extension of his environment.  

I was asked to do a little tutorial on my process for my final illustration for the 2D worlds

I decided to make a really quick new but similar scene, extending the "final illustration" using the same techniques.

Concept

After the miraculous victory in the alien invasion that left the earth's population devastated. The remaining survivors are setting up small farming communities and slowly rebuilding their new world from the scraps of the old in the shadow of the downed alien capital ships.

A few people are trying to unlock the secrets of the alien technology and some are turning it into a new religion.

A research lab on the outskirts of the settlement in the setting sun, feature two scientists talking about what has been found in the depths of the crashed space ship. Some kind of crystal that promises to unlock the mystery of the alien tech, they will soon make a breakthrough.

Lab

Architecture

Core

Initial Sketches

Assets / Prep Work

After the initial sketching I figured what I wanted to do, I began to model some simple buildings to play around with, I knew I wanted to explore what this world was like from lots of different settings, this would save me a lot of time in the end, the same goes for the spaceship.

3D Assets

Spaceship hull and interior shapes and random UI elements done in illustrator

World Building/Exploration

Layout / Comp

-Laying out the scene in cinema 4d and setting it up for the next steps in photoshop.

-Using object Buffers for masking in PS, useful passes like illumination and atmosphere.

-I render the scene out to a PSD with all the multipasses.

Overview/Illumination Pass/ Atmosphere Pass/ Object buffer

Photoshop

After rendering, I begin with setting up my PS doc, making folder with masks (Object buffers) for all the elements and place the illumination pass on top of the layer stack and set it to multiply.

Texturing

From here I quickly place photo textures on all surfaces. Using these folders allows me to move them around easily and to worry about masking them out, simply distort and warp them as needed aligning them to the surface of for example the building.

For the textures I made an "Atlas" with all the materials I needed. Then I could copy and paste into the scene and distort into place.

** Painting over the textures at this point just to break them up a little, for this click (i) the eyedropper tool and set the sample mode to "Current layer" now just paint on the texture layer.

Remember to set it back to All layer when you start to paint over the image again.

Paint-over

After everything has been textured I start to paint over the image, the object buffers also coming handy here to quickly select any given area. Adding more clouds and fog to help separate the foreground from the background and painting out some of the detail in the photo texture so it's not so dense.

To emphasize the lighting more I used the exposure adjustment layer to darken the whole image then paint in where I wanted the highlights.

More painting, adjusting the colors and adding some hitting the highlights with warm colors and some blue glow with color Dodge

** For non-destructive Color Dodging make a new layer and fill it with 100% black and set it to Color Dodge and paint in the glow on that. The result it much better than doing it on a transparent layer.

b. The Difference between Black filled layer and transparent

Adding some people, final color adjusting, Sharpen, a little bit of noise and crop to wrap it up.

Final

Conclusion

This workflow worked really well for me. Spending some time upfront to generate allowed me to explore and build up my world fairly quickly while keeping some elements visually consistent.

Check out Jesper Friis' Cubebrush store here!