So, this image just popped into my head one day: camels under a blackened sky. Sounds a bit dramatic, right? But it stuck with me. I just had to try and make it real, or at least, get it out of my system.
My First Stabs at It
First, I thought, "Easy, I'll just take a photo!" Yeah, right. Like I can just find some camels hanging out under a perfectly menacing, dark sky whenever I want. I drove around a bit, scouted some spots where I heard there might be some farm animals, thinking maybe I could fake it. Total waste of time. The lighting was always wrong, or, you know, no camels.
Okay, plan B: digital. I figured I'd try to piece it together. I’m no pro, but I know my way around a few programs. I started digging through old photos I had, looking for sky textures. Then I tried to find some decent camel photos online that I could, erm, 'borrow' for reference. Let me tell you, finding a camel in the right pose, with the right lighting, even for a composite? Nightmare.
I messed around with Photoshop for hours. Days, probably.
- Tried layering skies. One looked too fake, another too plain.
- Cutting out camels cleanly? Don't even get me started. Fur is a pain.
- Then getting the light on the camels to match this imaginary "blackened sky" – that was a whole other level of frustrating.
My computer chugged along. Sometimes I'd get something that looked okay-ish from a distance, but up close? A mess. It felt like I was trying to build a castle out of mud with a toothpick.
Then This Weird Thing Happened
I was getting seriously bogged down. Ready to just scrap the whole stupid idea. Then, I had to go to this really boring municipal meeting for some local issue I don't even remember. I was stuck in this stuffy room for like, three hours. Fluorescent lights, bad coffee, the whole nine yards. Outside, a storm was brewing. The sky got super dark, almost bruised-looking. And through the grimy window, I saw the streetlights flicker on, casting this weird, sickly orange glow on everything. It wasn't camels, obviously, but that awful, oppressive sky, that feeling of gloom – that was it. That was the 'blackened sky' I was after.
It’s funny, right? Inspiration strikes in the weirdest, most uninspiring places. I wasn’t even thinking about the project at that moment, just about how much I wanted to leave that meeting. But that image of the sky just burned itself into my brain. I even jotted down some notes on the back of a useless handout: "grimy yellow, deep bruise purple, no stars." Sounds like a bad poem, I know.
Pulling It All Together (Or Trying To)
So, I went back to my computer, feeling a bit more energised, or maybe just stubborn. I ditched most of the sky photos I’d been using and started trying to paint it from scratch, digitally, using that memory from the meeting. It was slow. I’m not a painter, not really. But I just kept layering colors, smudging things around. Using weird brushes I’d downloaded ages ago and never touched.
The camels were still a problem. I eventually found a reference that wasn't terrible and just kind of sketched them in, then refined it bit by bit. Kept them mostly as silhouettes, because honestly, trying to get details right was beyond me. And the "blackened sky" wasn’t just black; it was this murky, polluted, stormy mess I remembered. I tried to get that sickly streetlight glow in there too, just a hint on the horizon.
There were so many times I nearly gave up. I’d work on it, save it, open it the next day and think, "What is this garbage?" Then I’d tweak it some more. It’s not like I was following some grand plan. It was just nudging pixels around, changing opacity, messing with color balances, until it felt… less wrong.
In the end, I got something. It’s not gonna win any awards. It’s probably technically awful if a real artist looked at it. But it kind of looks like that image that was stuck in my head. The camels are there, the sky is definitely blackened. It feels a bit lonely, a bit grim. Exactly what I was going for, I guess.
And you know what? After all that effort, I showed it to a friend, and they squinted and said, "Huh. Looks like a scene from some old video game." I just laughed. Yeah, maybe it does. But it's my old video game scene. And at least it's out of my head now. Mostly.
