During summer break, I am spending a lot of time working on my digital painting skills. Here is my most recent work. I know I still have a long way to go, but I am happy with this as a good step along the way. As far as looking convincingly three-dimensional and structured, I feel this is a success. The details could be better. Also, the lighting could be a lot better. Here is how I did it.
Before I started on my own T-Rex, I did a study of another artists T-Rex. I would have studied photos too, but obviously that wasn't possible in this case.
First, I sketched the T-Rex. I focused on giving the sketch three-dimensional structure. To do this a studied T-Rex fossil skeletons.
Next, I rendered the basic values in greyscale. I do this so I am not distracted by the colors and can focus only on the form. However, I did have in mind that the underbelly had a brighter local color.
Then I added a quick color layer. This is just flat colors on an overlay layer on top of the grey scale layer.
On another solid layer I rendered the forms again in color. I got most of the colors from the lower layers. I did use the color picker occasionally but only to augment the colors I already had. Most of the work is done at this stage.
From here on out, was all adding details. I also noticed that I didn't have enough dark areas. Everything was around the same range of value, giving it an unnatural look. I also noticed that the all the colors were around the same saturation, so just as I added dark areas, I added so desaturated colors to make the saturated colors come forward more. I finished it off by adding scale texture and details.
I learned a lot from studying the other painting. Even though I know my T-Rex is much worse than the painting I copied, I still feel as though I improved quite a bit in doing this. Going forward, I will continue to study other paintings and photos, then try to get a similar result in my own paintings hoping for steady improvement.
