Life is rough, so bring some sandpaper: Technical Execution: The Road Not Taken

This design is known as 'The Road Not Taken'. It tries to show two different pathways, one through the 'phone zone', which ends in disaster and one through the 'no phone zone' which ends well.

This here is the initial sketch

First I drew back the lines to get them connected and make it easier to use the wand tool.

Then I used the wand tool to select the areas and colour them with paint bucket.

And with the pencil tool i touched up the whole drawing.

Next I used to burn tool to give the wrecked car a smokey effect

And as for the other cars in the 'phone zone' I used the warp option

To do stuff like this.

Then for the wrecked car, I used the smudge tool to try and make it seem as if it is burning.

I added a few lines of orange and yellow,

And made this.

Next I wanted to make a more memorable sky so I selected the whole blue sky with the wand tool and layered it.

Then I placed a very vividly coloured sky on top of the art piece.

And adjusted the layer arrangements. However I felt that the bright red colours on the right were contradictory to what was happening to the burning car in the middle so,

I used the marquee tool to select a portion of the background,

And copied it as a layer,

And flipped it horizontally. However, seeing that the two layers were not connected in the middle, I merged them,

And used the patch tool to try and blur the line.

And then I used the blending options to adjust the opacity as to not outshine the foreground.

Next I selected the buildings at the back

And adjusted their blending options, giving it an inner shadow and outer glow.

As for the bottom half of the art piece, I had to deviate from my original sketch because I was unable to make it happen the way I would have liked. So I inserted an image of a red line.