Words

For this, I wanted to use Real Neon Letters by DzFire. First thing was deciding what word to create. I already knew I wanted to have a woman smoking next to it. I considered sexier type words since that was kinda the vibe in my head, then I thought about doing something the opposite of the feel of the image. Sexier, darker, so I naturally went with ‘Sunshine’, but when that was too long ‘Sun’ worked fine enough. Although it ended up being really clever, I didn’t plan on the word Sun being like sunlight until I had the words in. THEN I was like ‘oh that’s funny!’.

With the idea in place, I decided to fill out the rest of the scene with beach-related props and clothing including the sun hat, beach ball and plastic chair. I went with a brick wall for the background because it reminded me of those boardwalk shops on the beach.

Lighting was from the neon lights, an extra spotlight in the same direction to punch up the lighting and a strong blue light coming from the other side. There was also a HDRI, but it was set very low. Leaving off the blue light was an option, but I decided I wanted strong color instead of dark shadows on that side.

I probably could have added more emissive surfaces to push that cyberpunk feel, but I didn’t want to overpower it either.

This image I almost scrapped a few times because it’s simpler compared to my other images (I’m still getting used to telling myself this is OKAY) and just silly fun. But *because* it was silly fun, it put a smile on my face whenever I looked at it, so I thought that was a good indicator of finishing it lol