the train

surreal digital illustration

A digital collage of a retouched tintype (Adobe Photoshop), a digital paint of a horse (with a Wacom Intuos drawing tablet) , and a Victorian era clip-art image of a train. The inspiration came from the image I stumbled upon in a book containing Victorian Era clip art. The woman in the original train picture looked very defiant, which matched the mood of the young woman in the tintype I retouched.

process

This project can be broken up into several smaller projects. The retouch of this tintype and a digital illustration of the horse. Then the two were combined in the final composition on the train. For the digital painting of the horse, I was leafing through a magazine for inspiration, and I stumbled upon a pair of horses being ridden in Colorado. I used the image as a reference, and themed the rest of the piece after visuals from the old west.

This is the drawing process I used to color the overall image (the train picture was originally black and white). I started by laying down solid colors and arranging the various elements. Then I layered shadow and light over the whole thing. To finish it all off, I desaturated all of the colors, darkened the horse figures to bring more emphasis to the woman, added a vignette, and a wooden barn texture as an overlay.