This picture of a red dragon with its mouth gaping open was done in response to the voices challenge on the art challenge website Illustration Friday. I an very much enjoying adding 3D techniques to my predominantly Photoshop illustration practice. First I created a frame with Photoshop CS3 so that the image seamlessly integrates with my website, which has a black background. The next stage in creating the illustration was to create a basic 3D dragon head in my 3D program.
I use trueSpace which is a free download and is just great even on my ancient memory challenged laptop. Once the dragon head shape was ready I rendered it to a jpeg file with a photograph I took of a fluorescent mineral as a background (more Spiralcat photographs here). I then opened the 3D image in Photoshop and added some interesting little things like a tongue, eyes and some smoke coming out of the 3D dragon's nostrils. I would probably like to add even more detail to the image using Photoshop. I would like to add scales and work on the eyes a little bit but the art challenge site Illustration Friday is all about producing a quick image in answer to their nice open brief and so I'm just going to leave it as it is.
I have a lot of other illustration work on this site. Take a look at my digital art here.
The site is of course about a great deal more than that. There is a lot more entertaining and informative content here.
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