Create “Ocean Monster” Surreal Digital Art in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the process used to create ocean monster attack surreal digital art in Photoshop. We will combine a number of objects such as city buildings, ocean and rocks to form the base on the image, and use an octopus stock photo as the monster. We will also add some tornado onto the image to finalise the effect.

The PSD file of this tutorial is available via the PSD Vault VIP members area.

This is an intermediate level tutorial and prior knowledge of Photoshop layers, image adjustments, layer masks are required.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative Colour Scheme:

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To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Ocean

City 1

City 2

Rock

Octopus

Tornado by AshenSorrow

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1500px * 844px, fill the background layer with a light grey colour as shown below:

Load the ocean stock image into Photoshop and select the following portion:

Copy and paste the selection to our canvas. Adjust the size of this layer so that the ocean part will take around 3/4 of the canvas height. The slightly rotate it clock-wise with the free transform tool:

Reduce the layer opacity of this layer to around 80%:

Apply the following adjustment layers as clipping masks to this ocean layer:

Black & White

Levels

Curves

and here is the effect so far:

Step 2

I decided to add some extra waves to the ocean to make it look more stormy. Go to the ocean stock and select a piece of the ocean as shown below with a Lasso tool (set feather to 40px):

Copy and paste the selection to our document, apply the black and white adjustment to this wave layer and place it onto the ocean:

Use this process to add more waves around the ocean:

Load the rock stock into Photoshop and select the following portion:

Copy and paste the selection to the right side of the canvas, blend it into the ocean and make it submerged:

Step 3

Load the “city 1” stock into Photoshop, select the following portion from the stock image:

Copy and paste the selection to our document, remove the unnecessary parts from it and place the buildings over the rock:

Load the “city 2” stock image into Photoshop and select the following portion:

Copy and paste the selection and place it to the bottom left as shown below:

Use a particle brush to add some particle effect around the buildings:

Apply the following adjustment layers as clipping masks to this building layer:

Black and White

Layer mask on the above black and white adjustment layer:

Levels

and you will have the following effect so far:

Repeat the above process, add more buildings to the centre and right side of the canvas:

Hint: use free transform tool to flip, distort the buildings to add variety and depth.

Step 4

Load the octopus image into Photoshop and we will use it to create the ocean monster. Cut out the octopus and place it to the position shown below. Use a soft eraser to fade the bottom part of it as shown below:

Apply the following adjustment layers to this octopus layer:

Black and white

Layer mask on the above black and white adjustment layer:

Levels

And you will have the following effect:

Repeat the above process to add 1 smaller monster to the left side,

Step 5

Add more waves to the top of ocean with the method described in step 2:

Use a cloud brush, paint some cloud around the top:

Load the tornado image into Photoshop, make a soft selection of it:

Copy and past the selection to our document. Use it to form 3 tornodes, make sure their sizes are different from each other:

Add some particles around the canvas:

This is my overall effect without adding any colour:

And this is the my final result with colours added: (click to enlarge)

Alternative Colour Scheme:

Please experiment your own colour scheme and the adjustment layers, and see what result different colour brings you.

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! If you have any questions about the steps, please contact me or leave a comment below. I will try my best to answer them.

Till next time, have a great day!