3-4 hours work. Photoshop 5.5. No photo manipulation or texture map.
After the idea stage and sketch is done, quickly block things in black and white. Decide what is the lighting for the scene.
My scene is going to be backlit. Add the appropriate light on the creature. This will be help to understand where the values are.
Start adding in the good stuff. Make sure there are always good contrast, so it will pop out better and read clear to what is going on.
I wanted to make the forehead design to stand out more. Using the Lasso tool, make a shape that suits your idea.
Throw in a solid color.
Paint in some texture and then add in the light and dark values to create the proper form.
adding subtle detail to enhance the story element. I wanted him to be creature that attacks the village for food.
I thought it would be funny if he was missing a leg, this can add a bit more story to it. Like as if he lost his leg during one of his past pillaging attempts. The lightning is a great visual to highlight that it is missing a leg. It's almost like it cut the leg itself.
Create a new layer and set it as Overlay. Dump in a color u like. Mine was purple
Reduce the saturation. Add key colors at strategic location to highlight things.
Drop in some more colors to give diversity to the creature and environment. Recommend to create new layer and keep it as normal setting, if you want to have more define details, like highlights, scars, dirty etc.
For final touches, I always love movie camera effects. So use my friend the Lasso Tool, select certain areas and blur it. I used blur brush, Gaussian blur and motion blur. This really give a good scene of motion and depth.
PM if you have any questions . :D
