Good night – the process

I usually work with highly detailed sketches, but this time I decided to start painting right away, with only tentative image in mind and see where it takes me.

1. I wanted to create an atmospheric and gloomy foggy scene with an old graveyard. So I started with simple, almost perfect 50% grey background. That would be a fog.

2. Then I created a ground plane. It's a foggy scene, and I wanted the ground to fade away very quickly. So I created a very simple gradient from dark grey to 50%, with few rough brushstrokes. Around 10 seconds of work:)

3. Then I roughly added all the basic elements, i.e. tombstones and an open grave, which supposed to be my main light source. It is the brightest object in the scene, though not completely white, because I'll would like to add some luminosity later. I divided all the tombstones to seven layers/planes, the closer the darker. The most distant one was only slightly darker than the grey mist.

4. Here I started adding some light to the closest tombstones and some details to the rest of the elements. I also added some moisture mist close to the ground.

5. More details and more light from the open grave on distant tombstones. Also added some grass and texture to the soil.

6. At this point I decided to add some characters. I started with simple dark silhouettes.

7. Added light to the characters.

8. Added some more luminosity, some lighting effects, few more details, depth of field and color correction.

That is all:)