If you take a look at the stock photos I used you can see that there is nothing special. I just went out of my house with my camera and shoot few things.
You can try to do it in your next manipulation too. It´s really fun.
Just place sky and background together. You can see that the background is just some random concrete floor which can be found almost everywhere.
After about 30 minutes of working. I blended sky and background and also place a few characters to i can easily imagine the perspective.
1 hour of working. Placed some moument. It´s a part of the real monument near my house. Lately I realized that I don´t need this stock photo because it´s very easy to create it just from some grunge texture.
1,5 hours of working. As you can see at the first time I wanted to use some skyscrapers in the background (from sxc.hu) but it didn´t have the mood I wished.
2hours of working. Picture is flipped to refresh my eyes. Skyscrapers are blended better, I also added first texture over the monument. Was working in black and white to focus on composition and not on color blending.
2,5 hours of working. Not much changes. You can see that the city dissapears. There is also few more characters in the background but nothing special. I was more thinking than working :)
3 hours of working. More people added, also first try on coloring.
3,5 hours of working. Big changes ... finally :) dramatically changed the shape of the monument, picture is cropped, different sky and reworked light beam.4 hours of working. Final picture. Added texture, change color a little, also added shadows to characters and monument.