Accepting Select Projects — Let’s Build Something Rare.
This isn't just a mockup. But a storytelling—intimate, invocative, alive. Today I'll show you how I achieved this look in Blender, Lightroom and Photoshop. Inspired by The Beast or Martin Chatwin, former High King of Fillory. Here is my spin on the famous series.
Book placement and lighting tips
Adding assets (butterflies, moss, mushroom, etc.)
Fire particle system basics
Rendering with Cycles and DOF (depth of field)
How I chose the HSL shifts
Global vs local exposure
Tone curve choices (cool mids? matte shadows?)
Creating Atmosphere with temperature, vibrance, and split toning
Why I added color dodging to the titles
Lifting the curves of the mushrooms to give them a light glow
Adding a subtle teal/indigo gradient to tie everything in.
Monitor 1
Monitor 2
Creativity meets practicality. Having two monitors saves a lot of time — it makes it much easier to visually navigate while adjusting and moving things around. In the lower-left corner of my first monitor, I keep a rendered view of the scene. This allows me to see changes in real time while I make adjustments on the second screen. The uppermost book is intentionally tilted, resting against a fallen branch to disrupt the balance slightly while still maintaining fluid harmony between the three. Controlled chaos.
For the lighting, I used an environmental HDRI called niederwihl_forest_4k.exr from PolyHaven. With the help of the EasyHDRI addon by Code of Art, importing EXR files became a breeze — freeing me to focus on building the world rather than setting up complicated fill, key, and backlights. A forest EXR file brings a natural quality to the light. Niederwihl Forest is naturally overcast, which softens the entire scene and adds a layer of subtle enchantment — making it feel more magical and alive.
Sometimes, creativity isn’t about modeling everything from scratch. Most studios kitbash — or use pre-made assets with commercial or Creative Commons licenses — to work faster and smarter. But it still takes an eye for detail and narrative precision to arrange a scene that feels fluid, storied, and visually compelling.
For this piece, I used assets from Botaniq and BlenderKit to build out the foliage. The book covers were designed by me in Photoshop. Some of the butterflies required editing — their wings were mirrored with the Mirror Modifier to allow for slight movement and variation, making them look as if they had just landed… or were slowly creeping toward the books. In The Magicians, the Beast is known for two visual motifs: moths and butterflies. I thought to myself — why can’t butterflies be intimidating too?
The remaining flora was placed strategically. I aimed for a delicate balance between harmony and overwhelm — and I believe I found it. A pinecone rests just beneath the uppermost book. Ferns and other scattered plants offer places for butterflies to land. Moss, lichen, branches — it all comes together to create a scene that feels lived-in, as if you could smell the petrichor rising from the forest floor.
To bring the scene to life, I created a simple fire particle system designed to mimic drifting embers. I started by building a separate collection with three small planes. In Edit Mode, I adjusted random vertices to give each one an irregular, ember-like shape. I assigned them a bright orange-red emission shader, turning the emission strength up to 1 so they’d glow properly in the dark environment.
Next, I added a new particle system and assigned the ember collection as the instanced objects, setting the particle count to around 3,000. To direct the movement, I added a force field angled toward the upper right, giving the illusion of wind carrying heat through the scene. I also placed three emitter planes just beneath the books to act as origin points for the embers, and set them to be invisible in renders to preserve the immersion. The result is a gentle upward flow of particles that feels natural, cinematic, and subtly enchanted.
For rendering, I used Blender's Cycles engine with a standard setup tuned for realism. The View Transform was set to AgX, using Look: None, with an Exposure of 0 and Gamma at 1.0 — giving me a clean, neutral starting point for color grading. The camera I used was the Arri Alexa LF, with Sensor Fit: Horizontal, a width of 36.7mm, and height of 25.54mm. The focal length was set to 50mm perspective, which gave the scene a cinematic, natural field of view.
I enabled Depth of Field, setting the Focus Object to one of the books, and the F-Stop to 8. This allowed the books to remain sharp while softly blurring butterflies and leaves that floated closer to the camera. That slight blur introduced a sense of layered movement and depth, helping the viewer’s eye fall into the scene the same way one would fall into one of The Beast's illusions — soft at the edges, sharp where it matters.
When color grading this scene in Lightroom, I focused on enhancing emotional contrast rather than simply boosting color. The reds and oranges — essential to the fire motif — were shifted ever so slightly to lean warmer (+5 hue on red, +40 saturation, +67 lightness), giving the flames on the book cover a sense of living ember without overpowering the forest around it.
I muted and cooled the greens and aquas to let the foliage settle into shadow — shifting hues toward blue, reducing saturation, and darkening lightness. This gave the vegetation a hushed, nocturnal quality. The blues and purples in the butterflies were carefully preserved, gently brightened to keep them visible, but not so saturated that they stole attention from the book. Every adjustment was made to guide the viewer’s gaze from firelight to forest, from magic to mystery.
色相 (sè xiàng) = Hue
饱和度 (bǎo hé dù) = Saturation
明亮度 (míng liàng dù) = Luminance
Reds
Oranges
Yellows
Greens
Aquas
Blues
Purples
Pinks
At this stage in my Lightroom journey, I mainly worked with global adjustments — meaning I brightened or darkened the entire image as a whole. I haven’t fully explored local exposure tools like radial filters or masks yet, but I’m looking forward to learning how to guide the viewer’s eye even more precisely in future edits. For this scene, the global exposure paired with targeted HSL shifts gave me enough control to achieve the mood I envisioned: soft embers, hidden shadows, and a focus that feels cinematic rather than clinical.
曝光度 (pù guāng dù) = Exposure
对比度 (duì bǐ dù) = Contrast
高光 (gāo guāng) = Highlights
阴影 (yīn yǐng) = Shadows
白色色阶 (bái sè sè jiē) = Whites
黑色色阶 (hēi sè sè jiē) = Blacks
Texture, Clarity/Sharpness, Dehaze
Amount, Midpoint, Feathering, Roundness, Highlights
Amount, Size, Roughness
I used the tone curve to create a controlled, cinematic mood without crushing the shadows entirely. I gave the shadows a slight lift, softening their edge just enough to suggest a matte texture, like forest moss at dusk—velvety, lightless, organic.
The midtones bend gently upward, preserving facial detail in the butterflies and natural contrast in the forest floor. Highlights rise steeply but don’t clip — this keeps the glow of the flames and embers intact, while still letting the scene feel hushed and nocturnal.
I also made minor adjustments to the red and blue channels — just enough to let the red titles and fire pop with intention, and to cool the midtones toward a twilight teal. This created a tonal push-pull between warmth and cold, which helps give the scene its layered visual tension: the forest is still, but the books are alive.
To establish a cool, enchanted nighttime mood, I adjusted the Color Temperature slightly toward blue (-10) and pushed the Tint just a bit toward green-magenta (-9). These subtle shifts cooled the entire scene and gave it the feeling of deep twilight, like something unfolding under a thick canopy of trees — quiet, mysterious, haunting.
Instead of oversaturating the entire palette, I used Vibrance (+15) to lift only the more muted colors — like the butterflies and embers — without overwhelming the rest of the scene. Saturation was pulled down slightly (-5) to prevent color clash and keep the mood grounded in realism.
The goal wasn’t to make the image "pop" — it was to make it breathe. These adjustments worked in harmony with the shadows and tone curve to build a color grade that whispers rather than shouts.
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To deepen the emotional resonance of the scene, I used split toning to subtly steer the shadows, midtones, and highlights toward specific hues. For the shadows, I added a cool cyan-teal (Hue: 206, Saturation: 25), which cast the lower half of the frame in a gentle, twilight chill — not to deaden the image, but to make the warmth of the book and fire feel even more alive by contrast.
In the midtones, I leaned toward a warmer orange hue (Hue: 34, Saturation: 19), threading warmth into the neutral tones and anchoring the fire motif even in the deeper forest tones. This gives the piece a heartbeat, even in the quiet parts.
The highlights received just a kiss of flame (Hue: 44, Saturation: 18) — enough to make the book titles and ember trails glow, while keeping the overall feel balanced. The goal wasn’t to color grade like a film still — it was to paint the mood of a world where fire and shadow coexist.
Settings like Blend (+45) and Balance (-20) helped keep transitions smooth and natural, shifting the emphasis slightly toward cooler shadows while letting the mids and highs breathe warmth.
The titles needed to glow. I used Color Dodge on a low-opacity brush to gently enhance the titles' luminosity, making sure the reds felt radiant even in the cool, forested atmosphere. It creates a subtle emphasis that pulls the viewer’s eye directly to the book covers, without overpowering the frame.
I isolated the mushroom layer and added a gentle Curves Adjustment, lifting the highlights just enough to give them a soft, natural glow — like the kind you might catch in bioluminescent fungi or faint forest light. It gives the scene a magical realism, as if these mushrooms aren’t glowing because of light… but because they belong in this world.
To finish the composite, I layered in a vertical gradient from teal to indigo using Soft Light blending mode at low opacity. This gradient unifies the shadows and background color tones, while also contrasting with the warm fire elements. It acts almost like a subtle color vignette, helping the center of the image breathe with clarity while the edges fade into dream.
This wasn’t just a mockup — it was a memory. A scene imagined between worlds. A moment that never appeared in The Magicians, but might have. Inspired by the haunting elegance of the show's visual style, I wanted to create something intimate, cinematic, and alive — a whisper of fire and forest, where even butterflies carry weight.
By blending Blender, Lightroom, and Photoshop, I was able to shape a visual mood that nods to Fillory while layering in my own symbolism. The butterflies — delicate but unnerving — move through the composition like quiet familiars, drawn to a force deeper than the flame itself.
If this style speaks to you — if you’re seeking atmospheric visual storytelling or custom promotional mockups that feel tailored and unforgettable — I’d love to connect. You’ll find a Contact Me button below.