|
Digitally Painting a Dinosaur in Photoshop 7.0
Figured I would do a tutorial on how I do my dinosaur paintings! This specific tutorial uses a painting of a Theropod, literally translated 'beast-footed'. As in, a 2 legged predator, like T-Rex. but this tutorial features specificifically Monolophosaurus. A medium sized predator found in China, with a very narrow (from the front) skull featuring a bony crest along the front part of it's head. |
I'll let you in on a secret. I cheat. I paint directly over a photograph of a skeleton. I could draw it and then scan it in like in my painting tutorial, but i just... well it was there, my brother in-law, Steve had taken these great pictures at the Royal Tyrell Museum, they were clear, high res, nice pose... and it would be guaranteed to be accurate this way.
- So... your first step is to find or take a nice clear photograph of a dinosaur skeleton. Resize the file to 300 dpi, and anywhere above 8"x10". you can work lower resolution, but you wont be able to get as good detail.
- Now you have to begin fleshing it out. draw on a new layer roughly where the outer skin and muscles, and eyes will go. I find a light blue colour works best. This layer will not feature at all into your final painitng, so if it is a bit sloppy, no worries.
- To know where the eyes go on the skull, you should know something about Theropod anatomy. most prehistoric predators had very large heads, but if those huge heads had too much bone, the creature would not be able to stand upright, being too top/front heavy. to compensate, large sections are missing from the middle part of the skull to keep it light. These are typically the largest holes found in the skull. These are NOT the eye sockets! they serve no purpose, structurally, aside form keeping the head light. The eye socket is usually not round, but a tall oval shape, the eyeball itself normally located near the top. the Nostril is the front-most hole, the ear, the rear-most and often rather hard to find.
- Then on a new layer, you colour in a solid base colour, which you then flesh out for the skin of the dinosaur. just a solid silouhette, conforming to your rough outline.
- Lock the transperency of that layer. with a soft, preferably speckly, (as in, leaves little blotches around the edges to help simulate a scaly texture) brush, fill in some basic colour patterns and shading. the great thing about dinosaurs is, you can make them any colour and pattern you wish!
- on a new layer you can sketch in the eyes, individual scales and finer details to help seperate one feature from another. On this layer i like to use a brush that mimics a pencil or crayon.
scales are actually very easy to do. with the help of the speckly shading on the lower layer helping to give texture, all you need to do is on your hilights layer use your pencil like brush to make short strokes in a very lightcolour for hilights and very dark for shadows. when zoomed in it looks like this:
but zoomed out it looks extremely scaly.
just continue plugging at it, it just takes some patience from here on in. Refine your base layer and your hilights layer at the same time, it is ok to go back to your base layer and fill it out more and change things if you discover something is not working. also you will want ot add teeth and claws tothe bas layer after you're sure everything is in the right place and you wont be doing a lot of colouring over them. Now would also be a good time to be adding details such as veins and wrinkles.
 
then just continue nitpicking and goint at it until it's done!
|
|
