About The Arts
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This video gives the work process I go through while creating a digital painting. A similar process was followed for the tutorials I posted recently.
The painting is not quite polished – but I tried keeping it short and quick.
You can see a larger image at the deviantART entry.
In this tutorial, you will see how you can do a digital painting of a bird of prey (similar to eagle) using GIMP or Photoshop or similar software. For this particular work, I used Photoshop Elements, but it can be easily reproduced in other software.
Start of by blocking out the basic shapes in a layer. Then start sketching the line art on a layer above it, while making the lower layer partially transparent to turn the earlier drawn lines to gray. (Read You Too Can Sketch if you need details on this approach).
After you have a clean line art, you can delete the layer containing construction lines or hide it.
In a layer below the line art, apply the basic color tones using a hard brush. Do not worry much about staying within the outline – but do keep in mind the internal boundary like the beak.
Assume a light direction and then layout the different color ranges on the same color layers, so that you can easily pick them up using the eyedropper tool.
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Dragon Workshop: Head | Body | Scales | Wings | Limbs And Talons | Horns And Other Addons | More…
Once you have got a dragon that has its main features designed, the next step is to make it look less bare and more interesting. There are more than a handful of things you can add on to a dragon including horns. With those handful of features, you can create countless of different looking dragons.
There are many types of horns. Seek inspiration from nature and study them. Many different animals, existing and extinct, have (or had) horns that either served them for their life style. In some cases they were so elaborate that it merely served the purpose of proving to the oppossite sex that it was a healthy candidate.
Whatever the reasons may be, nature can help us give different twists to the horns of these mythical creatures. The horns may be short and stubby, or long, or curved like a schimitar.
If the different types of horns were not enough, the different ways you can mount or attach the horn to the dragon can multiply the possiblity.
The simple and straight forward way is to mount it on the head or behind the jaw. But you need not restrict yourself to just that spot. Or even just two horns.
And it is not just the head where you can add horns. You can add it along the spine. If the dragon has heavy set limbs, you can have the horns sprout out of the elbow, knee or the ankle joints of the limbs.
There are other various things you can add to a dragon. For example, you need not restrict the tail to be a simple pointed one.
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Dragon Workshop: Head | Body | Scales | Wings | Limbs And Talons | Horns And Other Addons | More…
This is by far not definitive, and even as I post, I feel that this study could be extended. When it comes to dragon limbs – it is quite similar to anatomical structure of a quadruped (kwod’rah-ped), a four footed animal. But when it comes to the paw and talons – we can have several variations. Combine this with the different types of body and head of the dragon, we can have several creative variations.
Let us first look at the sketching of the limbs.
I touched upon this when discussing the dragon body.
You can see similarities of the dragon limbs with the human limbs or other animal limbs.
There are the familiar shoulder/hip joints, the elbow/knee joints, and the paws or hands and feet. A stricking feature of a medieval dragon or one that is heavy set is the strong and compressed structure of the hind limbs. A chinese dragon, as it is more snakelike and flies in the air like a snake, makes it more apt to have slender limbs.
It looks a bit bare – but try to get the shapes, volumes and the underlying muscle flow with the initial line art. You can always add details like scales later.
Let us now focus on the paws and talons.
As I said, there can be several variations when drawing dragon hands and feet.
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