Gettin' Somewhere

I think I'm pretty much done with the left side of this image, yay. On the right side, I've gotten onto the clouds, which I'll be done with pretty quickly. I need to do a little work on the water, maybe a couple of trees, and finish the stone arch. I still haven't decided exactly how I'll add people to this yet.

One thing about using photo overlays for textures and things like plants and stonework is that once you start doing it in an image, you really kinda have to keep doing it, because it's usually difficult and time-consuming to duplicate that kind of texture to the same degree of accuracy with brushes. However, trying to do that duplication, you learn a lot about how things actually look. I'm trying to only use just enough photo texture to bring the photo "look" in, but then I'm painting as much of the rest of the texture as possible. I did this on the clouds, both the orange volcanic plume (where I overlaid an actual explosion) and the white clouds on the right, where I laid a cloud photo over the rightmost cloud tower, and then hand-painted the other two towers using the first as reference and to sample colors.