Construction Site Environment

I wanted to create an environment that reflects my hero. As he works in construction, I thought a city construction site would be appropriate. In the context of gaming, this location could perhaps contain a safehouse where the player can rest and save his game progress. Cinematically, I liked the idea of having the scene set at dusk as the sun descends in the distance.  By day this area is lively and occupied by busy workers, by night there is only John Ramsey, preparing to disembark into the night and confront his corrupt adversaries:

With this piece I wanted to try and improve on my perspective drawing. To achieve this I set up a grid layer with a vanishing point. I also created a separate rule of thirds grid layer for composition purposes. I grabbed reference from the web of construction assets such as scaffolding and diggers and of course reference for the portaloo. I worked in greyscale initially to lay down the values (light to dark). Next, inspired by previously mentioned concept artist Erik Ryan, I applied blend layers to introduce light to the image. The orange light from the sun exists on a 'vivid light' blend layer, where the blue shadows are on an overlay layer. Together this creates a nice cinematic orange and teal colour bridge used often when colour grading film. I needed to add further colour dodge blend layers to add the turquoise tint to the portaloo and the subtle red tint to the barrels in the mid ground. The light layers were knocked down to around 30%, whereas the asset layers were knocked right down to around 10%. This maintains a gritty desaturated feel to the concept piece, reflecting the bleak 'anti-hero' theme surrounding my arguably unstable character.