Hey everyone! I’m back after a brief hiatus from uploading
because I had a big commercial photo job I had to work on and then I went on vacation for a little bit. Alright so I know I’m a little late on the
cyberpunk trend now, six months after the Cyberpunk 2077 game was released with absolutely
no controversy whatsoever, and everyone was making cyberpunk art. But in fairness I did first create this image
several months ago, it's just I've only just now gotten around to doing a breakdown video o
f it. This’ll be a fairly quick one, but I hope
you enjoy it and get inspired. Be sure to stick around to the very end of
this video where I’ll show you a grungy, painted version of this piece I recently made
that came out pretty awesome. Alright, let’s get started. So to get started I needed to find a stock
image of buildings that had a somewhat futuristic look AND were photographed from the ultra-low
angle needed to fit with the shot of the man in the trench coat whose gonna be the focal
point
of this image. It took a while but I did manage to find this
photo, and it worked just fine. I added a little haze over the buildings to
blend them into the background a bit so they didn’t take too much focus away from the
main figure once I added him to the scene. I found this bridge stock image. It’s not all that futuristic looking, but
it was at the right angle and I’ll add some elements to it in a bit that’ll make it
look more sci-fi. I clipped an adjustment layer to that to lower
it’s cont
rast some. And then I added in the main figure. So I came across this stock image on deviantArt
one day while I was looking for something else and it sparked the idea for this image. I thought the low angle would be a super unique
perspective for a cyberpunk-noir kind of scene. I clipped a few adjustment layers to the figure
to blend him into the scene better. And next I created a pillar holding up the bridge
by making a couple of solid shapes on a separate layer. I added this shape behind the f
igure just
to ground him a little bit so he didn’t look like he was kind of just floating there. I couldn’t find a stock image of a drone
that had the look I was going for AND was taken at the correct angle, so I used this
image I found of some kind of sci-fi ship and used that as the body of the drone. Then I added propellers from a different image
and darkened them down to match the rest of it, and added motion blur to the blades so
that the drone, looks as if it was actually hovering there an
d not just frozen in midair. Now since I wanted this to be a nighttime
scene, I added a color lookup adjustment that switches day to night by darkening the image
and adding a blue tint. Next I searched for stock images of advertisements
that looked like they would fit in a futuristic setting. I ended up combining a couple of images together
and transformed the perspective to fit it on the building, then added some effects to
make it look like it was a lit up hologram. To further make this look l
ike a futuristic
cyberpunk city for our character to walk through, I began adding lights to the scene. First I added some red lights to the building
on the right. I wanted there to be a light shining up into
the sky from the roof so I added a beam shining up and a glow around the base of that. Then I put a blue light along the bridge,
and some blue lights going up the side of the building on the left. Then some pink-ish lights on the building
in the back. All these lights were made by simply dra
wing
on blank layers with a white brush and adding inner and outer glows in the layer styles
dialogue box with different colors. Now to add some lights to the drone. I first put lights on the engines, then added
a glow to that. I thought it would tell more of a story if
I added a spotlight coming from the drone shining onto the figure. Like what if our character was a detective
in this futuristic metropolis and was wrongly blamed for a crime and this is one of many
drones sent out to search for
him. Building on this idea I searched and found
a stock image of a gun that was at close to the right angle. I still had to warp it’s perspective just
a little to make it fit the extreme angle, but it worked. And I darkened it down with an adjustment layer,
then extended the index finger so it actually went around the trigger. I wanted the gun to look more futuristic so
I added a light to it. I thought this series of lines could maybe
be like a magazine round counter or a fingerprint reader. I d
on't know, something, just as long as it looks futuristic. I added a red glow to the gun barrel so
it looked as if it was just fired, adding more mystery to the story the image is telling. Next I added outline reflections to the character
coming from the lights on the buildings. Then light reflections from the drone spotlight. Then reflections on the drone from the building
lights. To add more atmosphere I added some haze around
the scene, making sure that the haze reflected the color of the lig
hts around it. Then to make this futuristic cyberpunk scene
even more atmospheric, I searched for stock of rain. Again, this took some doing as it needed to
be from a low angle and on a black background so that it would blend into the scene easier,
but I did manage to find something that worked. Here, I used camera raw just to add a little
punch to the image. Then on a blank layer with the default brush
I painted some splashes of rain bouncing off the gun. And just cuz it’s a cyberpunk cliche an
d
I thought it’d look cool, I added the glowing line of a some kind of bionic implant on his
face. Lastly, I found this bright area at the bottom
right of the image a little distracting, so I just darkened that down real quick. And now this is where I initially stopped when
I created this image. I was happy with it and thought it looked
great just like this. However, as I tend to do, when I came back
to this image after some time, I started to play with it some more to see what else I
could do w
ith it. I wanted to see how it would look as a more
traditional concept art piece. So after some photobashing and overpainting
and tweaking the colors, this is what I came up with. I really like both versions. I like how clean and vibrant the original
version looks, but I also like the grunginess of the messy brush strokes and the more muted
color palette of the second version. Let me know which version you prefer in the
comments. Thanks for watching this video, and thank
you to everyone who’s b
een watching and subscribing. It’s taken a little while but I’m finally
starting to see some real growth on this channel. If you haven’t already, please be sure to
like and subscribe and hit the bell so you get notified when I upload a new video, which
I try to do every week. Let’s keep growing this channel together!
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