FINAL ASSAULT ON
CONSTANTINOPLE
WALLS, 1453
JOSE DANIEL CABRERA PEÑA
S
panish-born artist and illustrator Jose
Daniel Cabrera Peña (www.iouee.
cgsociety.org/) was first commissioned to
create Final Assault on Constantinople
Walls, 1453 as an illustration and matte painting for
Medieval Warfare Magazine.
It was a project many artists would have found
intimidating to say the least. Peña needed to
represent one of the darkest days in western
civilisation, detailing the brutality and chaos of the fall
of Constantinople in a historically accurate way. “ITECHNIQUES HOW I MADE
DISCOVER HOW THIS TALENTED ARTIST CREATED
AN ILLUSTRATION INSPIRED BY HISTORY
actually lacked enough documentation to portray
15th Century Byzantine troops [accurately],” he says,
“but we know western allies were present, so I
realised western men at arms could be shown but
with the main action and point of view placed on the
Ottoman side.”
To create the piece, Peña began by deciding on
key focal point figures and poses to add a powerful
narrative, as well as searching for any references
he could find to bring the action of 1453 straight to
the viewer today.03
PAINTING THE DAMAGED SIEGE TOWER
Still in the basic photo collage phase,
I continued searching for construction references and
painted the basic structure of what a damaged siege
tower would look like. At this stage I started
considering what the main lighting effect would be
and decided a strong backlight in the assault focal
point would play a major role in selling the idea of
the difficulty involved in reaching the top.01
FINDING REFERENCE
I started with a photo of some broken and
eroded towers from the old wall rings that protected
the city. I found these really fit the image of what
they would have looked like after the heavy
bombardment inflicted by the Ottomans.02
CREATING ATMOSPHERE
After lowering the impact of the strong
dark shadows (photographic default flaws) and
the strength of the sky blue tone, I choose to
strengthen the tower’s presence in the
composition and paint over it to get a more
painterly feel.“Permanent postproduction mock-ups were
made at every point from the start to the end of
this piece, so please do not consider the
postproduction or any other of these steps as
done in this strict order! They were instead all
worked simultaneously or in a rather random
pattern that puts experimentation and tests as
the most useful tool in image creation.”JOSE DANIEL CABRERA PEÑA REVEALS
HOW HIS WORKFLOW FOR IMAGE
CREATION DOESN’T INVOLVE WORKING
IN A STRICT LOGICAL ORDERTHE IMAGE
CREATION PIPELINE