Friday 16 January 2015

Photoshop Session - Lizard Creature Tutorial

In our first session of the new term, we got to watch another great tutorial by artist Feng Zhu. In the online lesson, Feng Zhu went through the basic elements to starting off a digital art piece. Several techniques were covered including how to place textures along with a short example of how to create bounce and backlit lighting. It was then our turn to try out the methods of practise. To make things easier in the time we had in our session, we were given some reference images and a line drawing to help us re-create his work.




Above is my progress towards my final piece. I started off by blocking in the simple colours and then adding in the bounce and strong contrasts of light with a soft edge brush. The second step was just refining what I had done and tidying up values with the areas of the body. I found it difficult to tone the arms as the actual angle of the shoulders are distorted in a concave manner with the chest armour. However, after cleaning the shadows up with a hard edge brush, I focused with more detailed around the upper torso. 




I was then able to go onto Google search and find a matt high quality free image of a gecko texture; that I used to give the detail of the lizard skin texture. Above is my almost finished piece I made, which I am rather pleased with given that we only had about four hours to make it. In addition, I found the texturing rather easy to do with the help of the warp tool on Adobe Photoshop CS6.




Above is the original free texture that I used multiple times (as seen closer up below) on the arms, head and neck area. Using 'Paste Special' we could mask around the edge of the areas we wanted covered and then simply wrap the image using the warp tool. To match the image colour to that of the lizard's, I converted the colour in the image to black and white and then changed the blending mode to soft light.



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