Just wrapped up this scene for the BG fantasy contest - Blender, Substance, and Photoshop, plus Inkscape for the book cover.
You can see more renders and extras over on my Artstation page
Saw it on Artstation and was like… Oh crap, I’m competing against Anthony. But I guess it’s not worth the effort unless the best Blender artists are participating in the competition.
And to sum it up- I love thus artwork 
fantastic, a really nice image!
Great story telling and great mood !
@michalzisman Haha thanks! Seems like just the other day I was having that same reaction when I saw Gleb or Dragoneex enter a contest. 
@manuelgrad @itza Thanks guys!
Excellent work ! I love the story telling and the painterly feel on the render. Very original image.
Fantastic, in every sense. Brings to mind “The Tombs Of Atuan” by ursula Le Guin.
So I’m guessing the picture is about some guy who wants something powerful from the book and the book is making him its slave?
I love to watch “Shot Breakdowns” and to show them to people who still use words like, “photorealistic.”
… or people who try to “do it all in a single magical render,” then twenty hours later try to do it again, and again, and again … never realizing that this was not how the reference image was ever made … :ba:
Even in the film days, photographers such as Ansel Adams observed that “a photograph is captured in a camera, but made in the darkroom.” So true.
(Many of Ansel’s negatives are preserved at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, some of them as part of darkroom lessons/challenges created by the master himself for the edification of future students. The original negatives look nothing-at-all like the popular images which were made from them. In his challenges, you work with exact duplicates of those negatives, and try to produce a work product that matches his examples … some of which are not like the popular versions.)
Awesome concept and styling!