How do you create a winner?

Where are you from and where do you live?

I come from the Finnish town of Järvenpää, now I reside in Helsinki, Finland.

When did you first get into design/photoshop? Was there a defining moment?

After I saw some amazing works by a fellow student Janne in high school, I bought a wacom tablet in 2000, at the age of 17. Sadly I had to retire the tablet a few months ago to make way for a new one.

How did you develop your skills? Self-taught, College/Art School, short courses?

I studied in the Senior secondary school of visual arts in Helsinki, but I wasn't aiming to illustrate for a living. After a few twists and turns I picked up digital painting and started to train my ass off. There really wasn't any teachers or courses to help out with that. So it was us few students practising pretty much on our own. Luckily we stumbled across a few internet forums where we could find some inspiration to go on and actually see that there could be a living made out of this.

What is your dayjob? What are you currently working on?

I have some freelance illustration projects going on, for example I'm coloring a web comic called August Jessor, at www.jessor.com. I cannot really take on a full time job right now, as I still have courses to finish at school. I'm studying for a BA in graphic design, at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki.

Who or what inspires you?

Dad. He passed away last summer, and us kids were left with his life work as a nature photographer, we have thousands and thousands of beautiful photos to go through, scan, and archive. It still amazes me how many hours of work goes into each decent photo. I'll never be able to top what he did with his trusty old Nikon FM.

How would you describe your Photoshop work?

I try to work fast. Get things on the canvas quickly and if the image does not show promise right from the start, scrap it and start over. I try to stay away from playing around with the layers too much by flattening often, to keep things simple.

Could you tell us something about how you created the winning entry?

Sure. I'll include some pictures of the process and some close ups, it makes things a bit easier to describe.

I've painted lots of birds before so when you released the ostrich image, I knew right away that it would be the main focus of my entry. So I slapped all the 5 photos on a large blank canvas, started throwing them around and filling the rest with paint, looking for an idea and composition. I think I had what I wanted in about 2 hours after the release of the photos.

I wasn't really sure how many people would attend the final round and I wanted to stay away from the forums to not get discouraged/lost with my idea, but I showed my sketch to some friends and was informed that somebody already made a robot with smoke rising in the horizon. I decided to change my composition and paint a whole city in the background instead of just the tiny coal plant silhouettes you can see in the initial sketch.At that point I thought I won't be able to really compete with this idea if other people are already posting similar ones. I'm very happy I decided to continue anyway!

About the painting process:

Once I had the sketch and composition nailed down, I cut away the foreground and painted the whole polluted city carefully and merged it with the sand photo from Crestock.

I then added the foreground, played around with the colors a little bit, and started to paint detail in and bring down the photo-look of the camera and the ostrich by overpainting them until they all started to fit in the same image.

As final adjustments I brought down the contrast of the background a little bit to bring out the foreground and make the image read better.

Any advice to the Photoshop beginner?

If you are looking to learn digital painting, head over to Sijun Forums and start crunching out speed paintings! Don't let the first 100 discourage you, it gets easier!

See more of Pekka's amazing Photoshop paintings.

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