The last time, when I painted a dragon with an open mouth, I had some troubles with its look. I decided to study animal mouths to get a little more experience and to be less reliant on references the next time I design a creature. Here’s how I did it! 1: Line Art Nothing new…
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I painted this dragon for fun, but also to experiment with adding a pattern to the scales in a natural way. I ended up with something quite interesting! Keep scrolling if you want to see the process. 1: Line Art As always, I sketched the lines first. It’s impossible to paint scales if you don’t…
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Recently I had a chance to draw the un-dead Viserion from Game of Thrones for a video tutorial for Envato Tuts+. The tutorial was only about drawing, but the line art I’ve ended up with was too pretty to leave it empty! So I painted it, using this opportunity to practice painting scales as seen…
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I’ve been studying feline heads for a few years now with a goal to understand them completely, to be able to create new species without any references. If this alone wasn’t difficult enough, I also wanted to develop a “recipe” that could potentially be used for other mammals, or the carnivores at least. I think…
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I’ve never played Spyro, but recently I’ve been watching my husband play the reignited edition and I started to wonder how Spyro would look if he was a “real” dragon. So here’s my idea. I also recorded the process, so you can watch how it was created. I made it sped up enough to keep…
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Some time ago I started to create a simple animation of bird wings, just to remind myself how they work. I worked on it in my free time, and it grew from something simple to something quite neat, so I decided to create a mini tutorial out of it. I also created a PSD file…
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Recently I found this photo of earless monitor lizards, and I loved how dragon-like their scales looked, so I decided to study them. But to make it more interesting, I decided to paint these scales on a dragon instead of simply copying the lizards. The final result looks quite cool, although I’m still quite far…
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After I painted Scar with a very quick method, I was wondering if it could be used for longer hair as well. Short answer: no. There’s no workaround when it comes to painting thick fur. If it’s supposed to look realistic and detailed, you must put in the hours, there’s no escape. But if it…
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I’ve painted this dragon without any real plan, but it looks like I found a cool method for painting scales without any special ambient occlusion layer. I’ve prepared some notes I’d like to share with you, although it’s not a real tutorial yet (I have a few issues to solve first before I can safely…
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This is not going to be a full fledged tutorial, but rather a quick presentation of how digital painting can be tackled for the fastest results. I’ll use my recent painting of Scar as an example. Step 1 Prepare your sketch. It doesn’t need to be a super clean piece of line art, but it…
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