All That Remains

This is a conceptual piece that reflects my currently dark mood with its macabre theme. The inspiration for this piece struck me completely out of the blue about two or three nights ago. I then immediately set about creating it before the idea slipped out of my head. I’ve got to say though, posing that skeleton was not as easy as posing most other figures and getting all the materials for all the objects to look like they were meant to go together when I actually cobbled together many different prop sets… all worth it in the end though.

The light setup (all traditional lighting) was actually a mess. I had about a dozen lights but only two or three really made any difference in the scene. The photos on the table were also rendered by me in three separate scenes which I then “aged” in Photoshop before adding them as textures for the photo frames. After rendering the main scene, I used a few more PS actions to age the scene as a whole then added some enhancement layers for color and contrast. The most time intensive part, other than figuring out the lighting and spending a lot of time on a spotlight effect I ended up not using, was adding all the cobwebs in a logical manner. Each cobweb is on its own layer so I could control the opacity of each one and each one has a different opacity. I really hate spiders so the cobwebs were a very uncomfortable thing for me to work with even though they are digital. Still, I knew that they were needed to complete this scene so complete it is was I did.

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