Dream of Leviathan

I had a dream of this image about a year ago and finally painted it up. I decided to treat this like a concept for a film shot so I used photo textures like the whale skeleton.

This is the color and light study I did first. Took me about 20 minutes to mock this up and I feel like I had to work the final image for hours just to be as effective as the study. In the end I prefer the final but there are still a lot of great implied details in the quick study.