Midsummer inspired me to do this standalone independent artwork depicting a woman watching the traditional Finnish midsummer bonfire that gathers people together. The modeling and rendering are not perfect, but instead I put my focus on the general feeling and ambience. I tried to capture the essence of the summer here in the north with many of its aspects and shades.
The background is just image planes from pictures that I took years ago. I removed the bright background in GIMP and imported the pictures as image planes. With some careful placement I managed to hide the hard seams and cuts so that it looks like a complete landscape scenery. The lake is just a plane with ocean modifier. The fire is not simulated, it’s a volume shader with some noise texture. I scaled the rural areas thin to create a smooth dissapearance of the volume so that it wouldn’t look like it’s just applied to an object. I’m not totally happy with the end result, but didn’t want to spend too much time fine tuning it. Dead tree trunks are a CC0 asset from PolyHaven (by Jenelle van Heerden and Rico Cilliers). The female model is my base character “Julia”. Rendered in Eevee, Blender 4.2.2. No post processing.
Edit: added a slight color change with color ramp to the volume shader. And a Sibelius-wrinkle in the forehead.
