The Longest Day

digital illustration

Going a lot more illustrative and narrative this go 'round. And, yet, I still wanted enough ambiguity so that each person can derive a different story. So, how did I do? Tell me what you think it's about. There's no right answer; so, ask me no questions about the true meaning or intended story. The story I had in mind while creating the piece is not as important as the story each person reads into it. I'm just curious what each of you takes away from this piece.
 
24in x 38.68in @ 150ppi
Zoomable Version: http://mattlindley.info/post/2013/03/29/The-Longest-Day.aspx
_____
Credits: There are a number of textures and images that I used here - all were offered online under Creative Commons licensing. 
In Blender, the building's textures and the textures used on the boy's shorts and baseball cap came from:
http://cgtextures.com
In Photoshop, other images were used to create textures in the image:
Grass Texture Sources:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/5106740833/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyarthur/5690039946/
Gravel Texture Source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/853146450/
I also used Photoshop Brushes for parts of the trees and bushes:
http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/1312-complete-tree-brush-pack
[horhew/brusheezy.com]
Here are some shots of the project along the way. Starting in Blender:
Imported a child model from Daz Studio. Very little modelling. Just made him very thin, ignored his face (never intended to show it in the final piece), and posed him as if walking.
Added some basic clothing. Keeping it simple. 
Time to texture the rest of the scene. I just hand painted the landscape. I could not find any image textures that worked for me. Plus, it was a good lesson on how to create a landscape texure by hand. Still have a lot to learn, though.
Here is the output from Blender:
Remove the sky and start adding more textures: (I didn't add the grass in Blender, since my PC is quite old and that would have put too much of a load on my processor and RAM)
Using a generated depth map (above) from Blender (I also edited the depth map in Ps, as you can see) --- see my other post for details on how I got the depth map out of Blender: http://bit.ly/VHlgpM --- I added atmosphere to set the backgound into, well, the background (below). The depth map was used in Ps as a mask on a gradient layer.
Add a final color adjustment and fog/mist and here is the final result:
That's it. Hope you like it. Again, there is a zoomable version, if you want a closer look at the details and textureshttp://mattlindley.info/post/2013/03/29/The-Longest-Day.aspx

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