Award-winning CG artist Jaime Jasso takes us through the creation of a superbly-integrated 2D environment made almost entirely from photographic elements, hand-tweaked and painstakingly retouched in Photoshop to fit the scene.

My idea behind this painting was to create a place where the viewer would feel spiritual peace, but at the same time have a sense that the place is dangerous. I made this image by joining more than 70 photos together with some 100% painted elements too. All the elements were heavily edited from the original to be integrated into the composition because I needed them for a specific purpose.

Admittedly, some of the perspectives in the image appear out-of-whack to our critical eyes, but the focus of this article is to demonstrate how I worked the composition up to this point, despite the corrections that could be made to make the composition more physically accurate.

Concept Sketches

The idea was born when a friend of mine returned from Argentina and gave me this cool postcard of Iguaçu Falls. Inspired by this I started sketching out this land of waterfalls and moody jungle. In the first sketch, I considered including a huge gothic castle connected by bridges to smaller structures. Then I designed the look and composition of the image, playing with the architecture between the waterfalls.

Later, I realized that the scale of the castle was too big for the falls, because I wanted the landscape to look huge and menacing as well. So I decided to change the design of the castle for a cluster of smaller temples linked together to build a ‘spiritual city'. In my following sketches I played with mood and color. I decided to use an overcast and mysterious complexion for the composition instead of a night shot; otherwise I would lose a lot of the detail in the waterfalls, foliage and temples.