Ghost Forest

Workflow:

With this Project I wanted to mainly focus on the mood and atmosphere of my scene. So I decided on a dark, rainy forest with lots of fog.

References were quite helpful. They informed my levels layout and were important for my color scheme and post processing.
Romain Joundeaus Paintings helped a lot with efficient use of fog and composition.

I started off with the typical WH questions, what, where, when, how, who to get a better feel for what I was actually looking and going for.
I watched some youtube videos for reference gathering and added images for atmosphere, mood, color scheme and some paintings to help with lighting and composition.

After I chose my setting I made a few quick sketches and started blocking in the scene.
I got some great feedback and settled on something smaller with one clear focal point.

Now I was able to set dress and properly support the composition.
I lit the scene according to my references and used lots of fog planes to highlight important edges.
I made sure that the black and white values didn't distract from the ghost and gave that area the highest contrast to support the silhouette.
Paintovers were incredibly helpful to fix my values, composition and lighting.

Working in 2D simplifies most of the process and helps greatly with problem solving.