My project for Adobe Stock's Take 10 Challenge: Make A Masterpiece Edition.

This was an interesting and enjoyable challenge! 

It was a departure from my usual composites that focus on people, and for which I normally take my own photos for the purpose.

My biggest challenge was combining images with different light sources in a way that makes sense to the viewer - I wanted my final scene to be strange, but also somewhat believable.

My first challenge was dealing with the sails. The theme was "The Storm" and yet the sails on the ship I wanted to use were decidedly slack - a mismatch for the turbulent waves that would become my sea. Upon reshaping the sails to appear damaged and as if the crew had reefed them in preparation for bad weather, I realized I would need a solution for the rigging that was hidden behind the sails. I sampled from the existing rigging and added some in the spaces using a combination of cloning and painting. This did take a while but I think the end result is better for it. I used parts of the sailing yachts image to repair the missing mast left behind by the sails' removal, as well as adding a flag to the masthead. 

I wanted to place the book fairly prominently, to hint that this place might exist in literary fantasy, having been inspired by stories from the game Sunless Sea of which I was reminded, first by the colour of the sea in the stock images and also by the island which bears a striking resemblance to the game's single sunlit isle, Aestival. While I did not aim to create a scene faithful to the Unterzee, it's strong storytelling aspect remained in my mind as I was working. Since the stock photo of the book itself was not entirely in focus (being more accurately an image of a man rather than a book), I have placed it immediately in the foreground and created an area in my final image which is slightly outside of its "depth of field."

My floating islands were fairly simply constructed, using the stony shore and island images. I took care to give them shadows on the surface of the sea, as well, and used the stony texture again to create floating - or falling - rocks below.

I was initially intending to place floating rocks above the ship and have one or two falling into the sea from an unseen floating isle, but eventually decided that I needed more interest below the ship for my composition to tie together well, and so I moved them all into the water where they help to tie the foreground to the rest of the image. They do still have the appearance of splashing into the sea, and hopefully combined with the shadow above the thoughtful viewer may make that connection as originally intended. Meanwhile, they serve as a path for the eye.

To add interest and contrast, once sky, sea, and stone were all in place, I altered the background colours from more-or-less-blue to include warmer tones as well, and added similar tones to other components, where necessary. This also helps to reinforce the fantastic nature of the location. I did hesitate to do this because of where the rays of light are coming from, however I think it did give an improved result.

I retained one lonely gull, as it seemed to help the overall mood of the image.

Overall I feel it came out rather nicely, especially as it's quite different to my usual work. Having enjoyed the process, I will likely construct more composite scenes in future.

Thanks for viewing my work!

This artwork was made using 10 Adobe Stock photos (below), provided by Adobe Stock for the purposes of this contest.

Thanks!