36 - WZ

Érick, better known as WZ, is a 22-year-old professional designer from Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil. He was always a lover of art, drawings, paintings, and all kinds of visual creativity were things he always looked at with interest and curiosity.

All his life, he made something related to art, but just as a hobby. Due to other commitments, he gave up this hobby in 2021. But now, that passion that was lost over time has returned with full power, following a professional path as a thumbnail designer in 2026. WZ is available for hire.

Twitter (X) → x.com/erckwz

This was my second submission in the Weekly Challenges. I confess that in the beginning, I didn't know what to do because we didn't have any assets to inspire us, but that was actually the best thing that could have happened.

My creativity started working like never before; I had so many good ideas that I spent two days just choosing which one to make. I thought about a pursuit in the Far West, living in the Matrix, or even Pandora (Avatar universe), but I chose to bring back a nostalgic memory of an animation I watched as a kid: How to Train Your Dragon.

Good. With the universe of How to Train Your Dragon defined, I really wanted to bring complete immersion into this world with a new kind of futuristic VR, where you could physically feel everything happening inside it.

Then, I came up with the idea of a flight above the ocean, passing through the clouds toward the island of Berk. With that, I could transmit the feeling of complete immersion and tell a story about what is actually happening inside the VR experience.

At this point, the concept was basically finished in my mind. My sweet memories of the flying scenes were so vivid that I could see them perfectly even without references. But for a better visualization of what I had in mind, these are the references from the scenes that I remembered and kept in my mind during the process…

I went straight to Flow Labs and started generating the assets for the composition. I asked it to generate different kinds of interactions with clouds, perspectives of flying on a dragon, different types of VR gears, and the ways the island would look in the composition.

After many generations, I gathered the best options and made the worst montage you will ever see in your life haha, just to see in practice what was in my mind.

To justify it, I had already lost too much time on the idea, so I had to make things fast to not miss the deadline lol.

With the montage of the composition done, I brought it to GPT and asked it to generate a line sketch with more details and immersion, correcting what I didn't like and repositioning some elements for better image reading.

Okay, now things are almost finished. With the elements, composition, and emotion defined, I only had to generate the final assets for the thumbnail.

I put the sketch into Flow Labs and asked it to generate many, many images, generating more and more with the different kinds of elements that Flow Labs added.

After more than 150 images generated, the hard work began. I filtered the best images with the right concept, right elements, and the right perspective, and put them all together in Photoshop to start blending and editing every element to make the image come alive and pass the correct emotion, from the ocean, sky, and island to the VR gloves/gear, leather saddle and the interaction with the clouds, etc.

After all the assets were blended together, I upscaled what was too blurry and pixelated. The thumbnail is almost finished. The rest was making the thumbnail "POP” by manually painting over it, playing with adjustment layers, shadows, lighting, details, overlays, etc…

If you found this edition of Unlayered helpful, please consider sharing it with someone who might benefit from this workflow too! 💙