The Gate to Mirinha - Walkthrough

This tutorial will take you through the creation of "The Gate to Mirinha". You can find the painting here. I will show you the main steps I took in painting this image, and try to explain what I have done.

As in most of my paintings I did a concept sketch before starting to paint it. The important thing was to get the perspective right. I wanted to make a really vast landscape, so I added fairly many segments to the bridge. The tree on the left balances the composition and adds to the depth of the whole painting.
This is the part where you block the colours in. Just use a big rough brush, and lay down the main colours of your painting. Try to paint loosely, but always keep in mind what mood you want your painting to have. I was going for a cold feeling with this, hence the blue colour scheme.
I just added a few silhouettes to my painting.
Now I cranked up the image size and started to refine the painting. Here you can see how I smoothened the bridge, made it look more solid and added a few details. I also painted a shadow, not making it too strong though, since I had a rather cloudy and misty weather, and therefor no strong lightsource.
After I was fairly satisfied with the bridge, I started to work on the backgroud. I created a layer underneath the bridge layer, to not have the mountains overlap the bridge. The difficult thing here was the snow. I was making a rather rocky kind of mountain, so I paintede snow on top of the rocks, but left the sides dark, since the snow is falling down there.
I made another mountain, behind my first one. This time a smoother mountain, with trees on it. The trees were done by creating a tree shaped brush, and painting with this. Just watch out to vary your trees in size and colour a little.
More mountains, more trees, more snow. I have also added some mist at the bottom of the right cliff, to indicate that it is going really deep.
Now for the really difficult part: the army, that is going to cross the bridge. I blocked in the shadows with a big rough brush. You can see the repeatitive pattern of it, I will have to do a lot of corrections on this later. I also painted a few silhouettes of single warriors. I tried around a while until I was satisfied with the size.
It is looking pretty crowded now, isn't it? What I have done is basically just adding more of these warriors, adding highlights, speers and such.
Finally I added a single warrior with a flag, who is walking at the end of the troops.
In the end I adjusted my colours, contrast and added a few details like crows that are flying around. And...that's it pretty much, I am done! Hope you found this walkthrough helpful, for more tutorials please visit my portfolio at http://www.dancakes.com. If you have any questions, be sure to drop me a mail at dan@dancakes.com .