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Description
From the get go I knew I wanted something very simple to execute that would give me time to tinker with a few things I wanted to try out. I thought it'd be fun to have some kind of ruin-like structure with a very large doorway that spanned most of the verticality of the piece and some creature coming out of the shadows. The robed wizard summoner dude in the foreground is more there just for scale, actually I was thinking of making it a couple of hapless adventurers lost and looking around but my 'simple' idea was taking a little longer to execute than I planned so I made a quick mid-sketch edit and went with a simple robed figure instead.

A lot of the muted color comes from a layer of color set to overlay and then duplicating that and inverting it, then shifting hue and saturation a bit on one or the other to see what comes out. There's a couple very large gradients up above on a layer set to soft light to give a semblance of light coming in from above somewhere. The easy trick with this is duplicating the layer and inverting it, then moving it below, which creates the implied shadow and diminished level of light near the floor. Put on another layer over that and do a quick color grab from halfway up the wall and you can paint in a very quick and dirty, ah, dirty floor to help ground the image and give a sense of some light overhead making its way down.

Description
From the get go I knew I wanted something very simple to execute that would give me time to tinker with a few things I wanted to try out. I thought it'd be fun to have some kind of ruin-like structure with a very large doorway that spanned most of the verticality of the piece and some creature coming out of the shadows. The robed wizard summoner dude in the foreground is more there just for scale, actually I was thinking of making it a couple of hapless adventurers lost and looking around but my 'simple' idea was taking a little longer to execute than I planned so I made a quick mid-sketch edit and went with a simple robed figure instead.

A lot of the muted color comes from a layer of color set to overlay and then duplicating that and inverting it, then shifting hue and saturation a bit on one or the other to see what comes out. There's a couple very large gradients up above on a layer set to soft light to give a semblance of light coming in from above somewhere. The easy trick with this is duplicating the layer and inverting it, then moving it below, which creates the implied shadow and diminished level of light near the floor. Put on another layer over that and do a quick color grab from halfway up the wall and you can paint in a very quick and dirty, ah, dirty floor to help ground the image and give a sense of some light overhead making its way down.