Question
Please help me quickly paint an abandoned futuristic city
Rodney Beavis, US
Answer
John replies
This involves creating a combination of futuristic, advanced technology with modernist architecture and corrosion, decay, vegetation overgrowth, blight, and crumbling or collapsed structures. You have to ask yourself, why was the city abandoned? Was it from war? Disease? Alien invasion? Depending on the circumstances, you’ll have to think about leaving evidence behind of the sudden abandonment. Consider adding bullet holes, overturned vehicles, emergency evacuation signs and other indicators.
My process involves creating a 3D model of the major structures to use as a reference. Modern and futurist architecture contains wavy lines and curves intermingled with straight-line grids, and this workflow saves me a lot of time trying to achieve an accurate perspective by drawing countless vanishing points on my own. I can also move the camera to try different perspectives to quickly find the composition I like.
Then I render an image from that angle, draw over the image, and then paint in the details. I also take the time to make lasso selections to separate background elements from the foreground so I can adjust colour and tone for each area separately.