Hayao Miyazaki meets Albert Bierstadt!

Full view is duty! (click on image)

Explanation here: please read !!
I did paint the whole Landscape and the Castle!

But, the landscape is heavily based on a painting from Albert Bierstadt
The work is in Public Domain, according to: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
What does that mean? fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/…

Actually the jpegs of this specific work for reference, were in such a bad quality that I had to paint the whole image from scratch - a nice test for me and I created some useful brushes along the way. Since I had no usable hi-res source, I hope you can accept the little flaws in it, most stuff is painted from imagination and my personal interpretation of huge jpeg-artifacts ;)

Good part of having to paint the whole thing was that I was able to push it more into a Miyazaki kind of mood and coloring that matches the concept that I originally had in mind.

The intention behind this is to learn from the old masters, Mastercopies are good, but actually there´s no better way of studying them than to get your hands dirty and spend 10 hours in the image and paint something that is not there. This time it took me around 20 hours.

Process here:




Actually I´m positively surprised about how well my recent Kaiju-piece and the Star Wars piece was perceived, thanks so much!

This is part of a study-series, called "Ancient Kaiju project (...and other big things)"

Suggestion for other Kaiju´s or big cinematic - things are welcome as well as also constructive comments!!
Ohmu is planned as well as also the robot from Laputa.

I like popculture and I love traditional art, so this project came so naturally to me and since the paintings are public domain, no one was harmed, not even the original paintings!

There is no intention to sell these images, I did them for learning purposes and use them in my classes as well, however, if you want it as a wallpaper, feel free to hit the download-button to get the 2560x1500 px version here.