#TakeTenContest After reading how Ankur Patar created his masterpieces, I was ready to try creating one myself. Thank you Adobe, @Behance and @adobestock for setting up the contest. 

The setting is very much as one would see in a classic painting with the ship being the hero and everything else happening around it. On the one (left) side, the rocky cliffs still manage to catch a bit of the fading sunlight, while on the right side, the other ship is already caught in the rains following the storm. I like the changing sea colour from a dark blue in the back to a dark emerald green in the foreground from one of the original photos. The darkening sky was achieved by layering three of the same sky photos, two of which were set to ‘multiply’ under effects (of which, one was used upside-down), the third to create the storm just above the horizon line. A fourth provided the reddening sky clouds one usually associate with rainy weather towards evening time. 

In order to create the sails of the ship blowing in the wind, I reference several images from the web. And inspired by Ankur Patar’s working methods on his masterpieces, took the ship apart before putting it all back together again, piece by piece. The sails were extracted, cleaned up and stitched together before they could be pulled and pinched into their final shapes. The same was done for the many ropes, cables and small elements found on the ship. Once the rigging was complete, the whole ship came alive.

The only reason I can think of that all the sails are still up, is that the ship is trying to outrun the fast approaching storm in the background. I used the liquify filter for some of the peaks in the waves in the foreground without going overboard, just to keep the whole scene looking natural. The bit of waves breaking in the bottom right corner is probably cause by shallow rocks just under the water surface in these narrow rocky channels. All images used were derived from all ten of the images provided for this challenge.