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Hiya everyone ^_^

Well, seeing that the old man has finished his tutorial today, I thought that I would do one for my friends here.

Its not a programming one, but an art one, hope its ok for u.

1. First of all, as I always do when I draw, the first step is to get a rough sketch down on paper. In this case its of an old sea monster for a game project I am working on. Once I'm happy with the sketch its scanned in (High Res scan) and cleaned up in photo shop.
(Pic 1)

You CAN use Paintshop Pro if you want, but you will have to adapt this tutorial to that package yourself...sorry!

2. Then I open a new layer and I used the pen tool to ink the drawing. I set the original pencil layer to an opacity of between 30 and 50%.
(Pic 2)


3. Once that's finished (Which took awhile! Lot's of scales! ^_^) I had a clean inked image ready for some colour.
(Pic 3)

Oh, remember to delete the underlying pencil layer so u can see it better.

4. The next step is the colour.
The way I go about this is to fill areas with colour to get a feel for the colour palate I want to use.
(Pic 4)

Just mess about with it and you will get what your aiming for, like I do.


5. Next on new layers I added the shading and highlights.
Using mostly the original colour choice u should set to "multiply" for shadows and "screen" for the highlights.
(Pic 5)

I then added a colour gradient on an underlying layer.

6. Then on a new layer I painted in the fire. To create the flames I built up the colour over a few layers, smudging the edges and adjusting the opacity of each layer until I was happy.
(Pic 6)


7. Next I painted the water. The best advice I can give u for painting water is to experiment with different brushes. I cant be more specific than that because water is very subjective and you may not like my way of doing it. Or if you cant do it, just like the sky, you can always get a picture and scan and use that, but that IS cheating
(Pic 7)


8. Next I painted the sky, moon, clouds etc. Here for the clouds I used the cloud filter, then gave the layer perspective. Next I erased parts to make the breaks in the cloud and added highlights and some hand painted clouds.
(Pic 8)


9. For the finishing touches I added the lighting from the flames, water spilling from The Leviathans body and the smoke from the nostrils.

And here is the finished result.
(Pic 9)



WOW, did it! The first tutorial I ever posted!!! ^_^

Hope you liked it.


CU

Dragon3

awesome peice of artwork Really very very impressive. First time i have seen a leviathan breathe fire though! You would think all the time shifting water through his guils would kinda put him out eh?

About the inking: for those of you stuck without a pen/tablet (or just have a very wobbly hand) and want to do smooth line art, I cannot recommend the pathing tools enough.

Briefly (im not going to write a full tutorial on this), in photoshop take a look at your layers window and you should see a tab called Paths. Selected it and make a new path, name it whatever you wish. Then select the pen tool (P or 3rd tool icon up from the bottom left) - click somewhere you wish to start an ink line and a dot (much like a vertex) will appear. Move somewhere else (usually some point down the line you are inking) and place another and you will see it draws a thin line between the two points. When placing the second point, DONT let go of the mouse button but try dragging your mouse around whilst still holding click. It will rotate the point you just placed causing the line to smoothly curve - by dragging in certain directions you can "push" the center point (or force point if you like) of the curve further down the line. By using varying amount of points down the line and curving the verts you can smoothly trace over sketches with ease and produce very fine line art. Be wary of extreme curves - making the points very curved and long (you will know what i mean by length when you try it) will effect the next dot you place and can cause odd irregularities.

Now, it hasnt actually drawn anything yet. When you have done placing lines, select the brush tool, a colour you want (black for line art naturally) and a brush size, go back to the paths tab and right click the path and click stroke. Make sure its set to use the brush and press okay. Walla, its sketched the path onto the active layer for you using your current brush settings and colour. I find the best results come by making multiple paths for different parts of the sketch and using different thickness brushes to stroke them. For example i often give the outside edges a thicker line than the inside ones.

If you hold down the mouse button on the pen tool icon there are many other options there, the only other one i ever use is convert point tool. You can use this to select already placed verts(dots, points, whatever) and rotate them n tweak em etc. Any points you have selected you can use the arrowkeys to move around (shift + arrowkeys for bigger movement) - you can also select path lines rather than just points if you need to. You can delete them by hitting delete when they are selected.

After you stroked all your paths you may want to go around with a brush fixing things up if theres any bits you dont think are quite perfect.

imho its no replacment for a skilled artist with a pen and tablet inking themselfs, but its a very good alternitive for those stuck using an insensitive mouse and i have often been able to produce very smooth line art in this fashion

very good work, may i suggest working in greyShade shades to start with, then you can add colours to each component and viola, from one base greyshaded illustration in photoshop you can pump out heaps of different coloured dragons or leviathons.

this is a wicked method to work with if your creating many different textures of monsters but all similar in shape yet different in colour.

good work we need some more decent artists around here.

Thanks for the feedback

Glad you both liked it! And I will try the grayshade thing next time indi.

Nice work Dragon3. I have photoshop cs do you having any tips on control in that? I like what you have done it reminds of a different artwork tutorial that I've seen before. You should write a tips pamphlet seriously. Or even better I have a final exam where I have to do a magazine in multiprogram format so with your permission I'd like to use your tutorial in a like a 'tips from the experts' section. This is greatly appreciated stuff.