'Photoshop'

Software Used :

Photoshop

Step 1 :

Hello, for this making of, I will try my best to backtrack the steps that I took to complete my image, The Confrontation. I’ve always been inspired and fascinated by dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, so for this painting, I wanted to create an adventure based fantasy piece. With that idea in mind I started off with a simple line drawing, just to get the pose, gesture, expression, and anatomy of the dinosaur. Keep in mind that since this is a personal piece, I didn’t bother doing any thumbnails or pre-planning, since I had everything pretty much in my head and just wanted to start painting as early as possible. Needless to say, skipping this process did present me with a couple of roadblocks along the process so do keep in mind that thumbnails and idea sketching are crucial especially if your work is for a client. Also doing multiple thumbnails gives you more options to choose from, whether for yourself or for a client. I wasn’t too sure about the composition at this stage because of my rush to jump right in, and it caused me to go in circles, so a great way to avoid this and save time is to simply give your-self more options in the beginning (Fig.01). The brush that I used to do most of the preliminary drawing is basically a default round brush built into Photoshop as shown in Fig.01a. The settings are pretty basic, and I find that this brush is fairly versatile at this stage to lay down ideas and make quick changes.

Fig.01

Fig.01a

Step 2 :

In this step, I felt that his expression wasn’t really what I had in mind. I wanted the beast to be more aggressive and meaner, so I gave him an opened mouth as part of my idea was to have it growl at his newfound prey. The dinosaur itself is not anatomically accurate, being that I wanted some creativity and artistic ownership rather than copy a real dinosaur. It was more fun for me that way. (Fig.02)

Fig.02

Step 3 :

At this point, I decided on most of the composition, placing the figure on the far upper left corner on top of these giant banyan roots that I wanted to incorporate into this piece. The roots are enormous and marvelous structures, and if you’ve seen them in person you’ll know what I’m talking about. What I want to show is basically a square-off between man and beast, so at this stage I was deciding on the placement mostly, and how to integrate forest elements into the painting without causing tangents that will disturb the “flow” of the image. (Fig.03)

Fig.03

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Related Tutorials

If you liked reading this tutorial, you may also be interested in the following. "Making of a Creature Concept / Illustration" by Chris Legaspi This tutorial is a detailed, step by step demonstration of my process in the making of a creature illustration. As a side note, this assignment was a Concept Art test for Cryptic Studios. I did get the job, so in that respect, this piece was a success. "Portrait of a Dragon" by Kerem Beyit In this tutorial we are going to colour a dragon portrait.  Like I always say, it's impossible to make a good painting without a good sketch, that's why if your drawing is not as strong as you'd like, you should go ahead and buy a sketchbook and pencil before taking up Photoshop and a graphics tablet. (Fig.01)

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