Blue Dragon Update

So I always hate it when just as I'm trying to fall asleep my brain goes nuts imagining things. It can be anything from daydreaming to working on art pieces or even just refining what I was working on that day. Since I spent all yesterday working on my blue dragon my brain went crazy trying to come up with a decent background. I've been lazily painting one every now and then while working on my blue dragon but I've never felt satisfied with them. Needless to say I didn't get much sleep.

One major problem comes up now after I decided I wasn't going to have a background. Lighting. I've done everything backwards. Definitely for my next major piece I'm going to do the background first. This will resolve a lot of the problems I'm having now.... composition for example. It's kinda hard to make a composition after the fact and I'm afraid that will show when I try to flesh out the background I have planned for my fem dragon.

This nightmarish piece has been dragging on for a month now partly because I'm refreshing myself on photoshop's capabilities and mostly because I've never before used it to paint something in all seriousness. The learning curve is steep and I'm sure I'll be learning something on everything I do from here on to infinity.

The belly scales for example. They're not really scales at all. I think I re-painted them 5 times before I got what I wanted. At first I tried just shading them. Then they looked like plasticine. I find when I shade things with low opacity brushing it looks just like plasticine or clay! I know most people would go out and grab some kind of stock texture and do the easy texture overlay thing but that's not what I'm trying to learn here. I'm trying to replicate the textures on my own like a real artist would on a real canvas. Go figure I have to pick the hard things first. Oh and I'm very aware of the irony considering my choice of medium isn't "real" in the tangible sense of the word.

So on I went to try replicating the horn texture... maybe they should match. That didn't work. How about looking at what a real snake's belly looks like and try that? Nope. Ok... what about just anime cell shading. Well that's goofy cuz the rest of the picture isn't anything like that. So while wiping out the cell shading I tried the horn texture again but I subdued it with a soft brush. It works. On to the next thing!

(I think I need to add here that the high resolution and sheer size of the file is breaking the laptop. It was a whopping 530mb but after some layer merging and deleting it's down to 359mb. Still huge I think but it doesn't save the processor any because as I kept repainting the belly scales I would move the canvas around to different focal points and the memory artifacts of what I'd previously painted over would show up as I was moving the canvas until I stopped to rest on the next scale down the line. I was working very close up. Also... saving the file takes an entire minute or two. Poor laptop.)

The next thing to fix is this: the thick scales seem to be just floating on the dragon's surface so I need to readjust the shading to reflect that they are indeed grounded into the skin.

She's coming along slowly. But I can taste that I'm near the end. I think I will post the head detail separate from the background I'm creating for it. That way it will be like they were two different things. And they are. Because in the not so exact words of Feng 'you always do your whole composition first before you start on the details' :p