Tendrils

This is my first digital matte painting assignment, in which we created a final concept art piece after doing sketches, colour tests, & coming up with a story for it. We had a choice of using either painting, photo-bashing or both. I painted most of the piece and *tried* a little bit of photo-bashing on the cliffs.

Story synopsis:
In the distant future, the world used to be filled with vastly advanced civilizations of varying kinds & sizes, until a mysterious disaster struck and almost everyone that lived vanished, leaving their cities to decay.
Now centuries have gone by & the remaining population have lived in small settlements ever since, with stories about what happened to their ancestors long forgotten.
A lone traveler from one of these settlements decides to explore the world beyond her settlement for the first time, determined to find out what happened to these ruined cities that are commonplace here. After travelling for a long distance, she encounters this mysterious structure in a crater, with smoke coming from somewhere deeper inside the structure...