This next piece was again inspired by the work i originally started doing a few months ago, looking again at the Distant Hills image incorporating the distant city with the man seemingly searching for his way there. I used a similar approach to this concept, hoping to create a richly coloured image with sensible contrast and legitimate depth.

The initial concept was one made of rough lines and loosely based ideas that i thought would work well in a theme overall. The cave to the right working as perhaps a secret entrance the the city that towers above it, and some kind of dragon hovering over a city tin the distance on the left gives depth to the piece in the hope that the colours and fine cloud layers would accentuate that further. Again though, the issue is not the drawing itself, but the colours that will be put to it afterwards.

With the initial idea sketch done, the work again turns to colouring. No matter what it would be, i feel colour is my main issues in concept design. Maybe not necessarily the application of light and dark to create shade and tone, but the way these colours work together, and the ways individual colours will work in a final piece when laying base tones. This is and was my main issue with this image, and ended up with me leaving in half finished again. The problem i've had with these images when involving colour is that i can't seem to get the right contrast and gel of colours right for the image to make sense, and the fact that it takes so long to lay these colours down in the first place makes it even more difficult to go over the idea again.

That said, i persisted a little longer in the hope that shading would make a little more sense of the colours i had laid down.

My issue with this image on it's own is that there is far too much contrast in the whole image when there really doesn't need to be. It is by no means near finished, but seeing the concept at this point doesn't really make for something that is a worthwhile effort. I think the initial sketch works much better that the coloured version of it at this point. Although i'd like to work this piece through a little more for the integration to Cinema 4D, i don't really feel that if my eye for colour isn't too great at the moment, it will be later on when it comes to transitioning it into a fully formed concept. That isn't ot say i won't rework it at some point in the future, but i just think it would be best left for this project. I don't think, with this concept and approach at least, that i'm heading in the right direction.

I think maybe for this project i should reduce down the size of my workload by just approaching concepts in greyscale and working colour in later on, concentrating more on where the light falls at this point than where the colour fits in.