Endika Project: Our Lady of Pain Procession

This is the annual Our Lady of Pain Procession. The Goddess, unbeknownst to worshipers, is none other than the T'lantian Demon Priestess, the snake-legged Azeneth. Order dignitaries wear archaic clothing as befits the occasion. This is a parallel world, so any similarity to Venice is purely accidental. Special thanks to Italy, my love, for preserving and maintaining its amazing arts and crafts tradition.
Making of:
- spent a week in Venice taking reference photography, stitched the source plate and graded it to memory, reconstructed perspective and lighting setup, cleaned the plate up
- spent hours looking for ref images (costumes, poses), extracted characters, graded them to match the plate, fixed values and colors the way a human eye would perceive them
- integrated characters, constructed cast shadows matching the plate key light, fixed shading on some characters
- fixed depth, added clouds
That was my source composite to paint from. No secrets there. Size: 9K.