Ancient Guardians Temple

Ancient Guardians Temple

Ancient Guardians is a project created as part of The Rookies "Forbidden Lands, Fallen Empires, and Ancient Guardians" contest for which I came RUNNER-UP. The brief was to create a single, epic illustration that is both fantastic yet believable, original yet relate-able and which demonstrates high levels of artistic skill and storytelling ability.

For this, I decided to make an underground temple in the manner of a buried Pantheon that served a humanoid civilization as a council chamber.

I started with several quick design types of research, before moving on to placement and vegetation researches. Once I had found an interesting design, I switched to Cinema 4D to place my 3D elements, the kitbash statues, and characters and the rest I had modeled.

The story behind this image is a group of explorers discovering this fantastic place through a hole at the top of this buried temple.

I used Photoshop a lot to retouch the textures, repaint several of them, and add shadows or lights. Also to create all this underground atmosphere with the light well and the surrounding dust/particles.

C4D Render

Research sketches