Title: Citadel
Name: Jordan Nieuwland
Country: Canada
Software: Photoshop
Been on hiatus for awhile. last post was 2005!
Had some free time at work… so i whipped up this castle concept. I started with a rough sketch which you can see here:
http://www.paintscience.com/pages/palace_lighting.htm
then I grabbed a bunch of reference images for style and texture.
Jordan
Just Brilliant!! Great composition, Great color usage. It feels epic yet beautiful and serene. One of your Best pieces yet! Keep up the good work. I would love to have a large print of this, let me know if you ever sell posters or anything.
Jon
Love the colors and the mood, makes you wonder what’s going on in the castle for the streets below to be deserted, great work! 
Great Work! Love the Composition.
From seen your Website i have to say that you have a great way of drawing Athmosphere and Mood. The additional use of subtle Blur and Grain make your drawings really nice to watch.
Wonderful work! bookmarked
Beautiful work, I specially like the background, the lighting and color are very beautiful as well 
Mmmm, beautiful. I love the composition and well used space around the whole image. I am a fan of cobblestone streets, which I always struggle with. Would have loved to see some people on the street, just because I am curious to see what they would look like. Must have taken sometime to paint all those houses on the hill… Patience is golden. Well done!
Thanks for the words people… I kept people out of the street because I wanted the citadel to be the maine focus. The concept of the environment is the character here. Also all those houses took no time at all… a few key reference photos provided all the building texture as well as matched lighting i needed. Then I colour corrected and painted on top to blend it all together. Since I had a clear idea of the image i wanted to create, researching photo ref was easy.
This is fabulous. I absolutely adore the storybook quality it has. My only real concern is that perhaps you went a little too crazy with the contrast in the foreground? It seems a tad drastic, especially on the left side, where the dark colours make it seem quite heavily-weighted towards the left, almost enough to compete with the citadel which should be the clear focus of the image. It’s possible, however, that simply cropping some of the left side off would address this, but it’s obviously entirely your choice to leave it this way too.
Really cool stuff. It looks like something you’d see at the beginning of a fairy tale film, and I like the way the birds are the only sign of life. Plugged.
