Also darken the base of the ice shards and the wing, and bring out the ear and some of the feathers as well. I'm using a Soft Round brush for this as I find it is perfect for working on ambient occlusion-type shadows.

Creating a new layer set to Colour, lightly paint in some orange tones to introduce some complimentary color to the image and help pull the griffin away from the background (Fig.15).


The nostril area isn't looking that good so let's do a little redesigning. Sculpt the shape out of existing highlight, mid-tone and shadow colors already present on the beak so that you don't need to pick new colors (Fig.16).


I also start to cut down the amount of Sub-Surface Scattering; this is the amount of light that passes through the material of the beak. We do this by painting the lighter areas a little thinner. To bring out the depth of the eye, increase the highlights around the outside of the eye socket, thereby increasing the contrast.

Finally, start blocking out the wing colors a little more, concentrating on the large swaths of dark tone rather than any details.

I'm going to work on the sky next, but instead of painting all the details, let's use a free texture from: http://freetextures.3dtotal.com. Fig.17 shows the image I'm using, brought into the griffin illustration with no alternations.



Set the Blend mode to Overlay, alter the Opacity to 76% and add a new Vector mask by going to Layer > Vector Mask > Reveal All. Using black, paint out the areas of the sky that are not required (Fig.18).