Shrine to Saint Jiub the Eradicator (Patreon)

This one was fun! I originally created this design for this month's bookmarks, but it was too realistic and too detailed to sit with the others. I still liked it, though, and wanted to find something nice to do with it. Since this was suppose to be an in-world image, what better place to put it than in the world? 

I started by finding a suitable location to modify and paint over: a shrine to the Tribunal in Ald Velothi. Here's what it normally looks like: 

It's a little bare, so I added more clutter and a few additional lightsources, and posed the camera. Here's what it looked like pasted into photoshop:

From there, I adjusted the brightness in the middle and the darkness at the edges using masked curve layers, plus made the whole thing twice as big and slapped a sharpening filter on it.

From there, I masked out the shrine and used a combination of chalk brushes and the magic eraser in preparation for inserting my own. 

With the background complete, I dragged the vectors straight from Illustrator into Photoshop, and used the perspective and distortion adjustment tools to make it fit onto the triangular shrine. A combination of overlay and multiply modes, both at low opacity, were used to make the image look like it's painted on, and it was roughed up using various texture brushes on layer masks. 

More or less done at this point, I brightened up the top of the shrine to make the image more readable, added a cool dark gradient across the background to make the shrine pop a bit more, and painted over some of the worst pixelated edges. The final result can be seen at the top!

Here's a gif of the whole process: