Background - Beowulf Illustration

When it came to the background... I scanned a couple interior photographs that I had taken of Paris' famous Notre Dame Cathedral back in the mid 1990's. I nabbed parts of the arches from the photo on the left, and the arches and vertical architectural features from the photo on the right, then spent some time warping, distorting, scaling, changing the perspective of these elements, and played around with the positioning of them until I found the desired composition. I also used Photoshop's blur filters to help with the illusion of depth of field, and of course messed with the color/saturation/levels to make sure everything work together. After that I used very bright color to create (hopefully) the sense of moonlight streaming in from an unseen rooftop windows or openings. Again, I used the blur and transparency features for the creation of the lighting effects, then finally added some subtle texture (with a very large paint brush) to give it all a more gritty vibe (and a sense of dust particles in swirling in the dim moon beams). Everything was placed on individual layers for optimum control. - db