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Description

I think this piece will always be one of my favourites! I was experimenting a lot with colour, and it all seem to come together quite quickly.

1 - Super rough sketching on a separate layer. Basic gradient for the background.

2 - Ontop of everything, just started chucking down colours. Studying a few eclipse ref pics to see how the light works, with a dark centre and saturated edges where the light is piercing out. Thinking of mainly reds and warms as the main colour, with desaturated purples and blues to support it.

3 - Changed my mind a bit here. It was going to end up too dark, and thought I'd experiment with using grass instead of a rocky ground. I still want an overall warm composition, so using warm, yellowy tones for the greens to support everything. Doodled a rough sketch of the dragon.

4 - This looks like a big jump, but it really isn't! Just starting to add texture to the ground, varying different brushes, especially dry brush for that grain effect! Rocks were just standard round brush, really keeping in mind where the shadows and lights would fall. The dragon was pretty much done in one go here, again, just really keeping in mind form and where the light would hit. I cannot stress enough how much an understanding of form is important with this! I still have so much work to do on form, but this piece really was an insight to see how much I've improved with it.

5 - Add cool tones to the shadows facing away from the sun on the dragon. Had lots of fun with the cloud shapes. If I went back to this, I would make use of the mixer brush on the clouds to help them blend better. Here, I pretty much just used a cloud brush and a chalk brush on varying opacities. It meant blending took a while!

6 - Overall colour and level tweaks. Pushed shadows on the rocks and added cast shadows on the ground. Minor tweaks here and there - used a circle gradient on an overlay layer on a few points around the eclipse with a pale yellow to simulate light escaping.

Final piece -

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Follow me on Instagram - www.instagram.com/fleeting_emb…

Description

I think this piece will always be one of my favourites! I was experimenting a lot with colour, and it all seem to come together quite quickly.

1 - Super rough sketching on a separate layer. Basic gradient for the background.

2 - Ontop of everything, just started chucking down colours. Studying a few eclipse ref pics to see how the light works, with a dark centre and saturated edges where the light is piercing out. Thinking of mainly reds and warms as the main colour, with desaturated purples and blues to support it.

3 - Changed my mind a bit here. It was going to end up too dark, and thought I'd experiment with using grass instead of a rocky ground. I still want an overall warm composition, so using warm, yellowy tones for the greens to support everything. Doodled a rough sketch of the dragon.

4 - This looks like a big jump, but it really isn't! Just starting to add texture to the ground, varying different brushes, especially dry brush for that grain effect! Rocks were just standard round brush, really keeping in mind where the shadows and lights would fall. The dragon was pretty much done in one go here, again, just really keeping in mind form and where the light would hit. I cannot stress enough how much an understanding of form is important with this! I still have so much work to do on form, but this piece really was an insight to see how much I've improved with it.

5 - Add cool tones to the shadows facing away from the sun on the dragon. Had lots of fun with the cloud shapes. If I went back to this, I would make use of the mixer brush on the clouds to help them blend better. Here, I pretty much just used a cloud brush and a chalk brush on varying opacities. It meant blending took a while!

6 - Overall colour and level tweaks. Pushed shadows on the rocks and added cast shadows on the ground. Minor tweaks here and there - used a circle gradient on an overlay layer on a few points around the eclipse with a pale yellow to simulate light escaping.

Final piece -

-----------------------
Follow me on Instagram - www.instagram.com/fleeting_emb…