Tower of the East

I wanted to do something slightly more exotic than my usual fare, so here’s a nod to my father’s heritage & the Robert E. Howard pulp stories he introduced me to in my youth.

I am something of a fan of the often ignored traditional methodologies for creating strong compositions. Here is the dynamic symmetry grid I used to arrange the image.

The cyan light beam is solely to add a dash of magic & a compliment to the red.

I had played around with several oasis designs (a few WIPs of which are shown here), in the end I felt they distracted too much from the tower & perhaps made the overall impression too friendly.

The legendary Don Lawrence's Trigan Empire was another great childhood influence & I did a few explorations with palette & saturation levels to see if the scene would sit in his fantasy worlds...

Also in looking at different colour takes, I wanted to see what it would look like with a full-on early 70's Frank Frazetta trip!

And a 'Great Wave' variant using PS's neural filters - impressive AI-based technology that is only going to become more powerful over the coming years...