11
ADD SOME SCALES
For some supplementary, but important details, we’re moving onto the Hydra’s scales. While there
are multiple ways of going about dragon scales, we’re going to go for more of a cartoon-like approach here.
Selecting a Soft Airbrush on a new layer, we’re going to imply circles of all shapes and sizes around the
dragon’s body. It’s fine to cluster them here and there, but try to make sure that some connect so it gives the
illusion of there being many while only drawing few. We’ll also darken a few of them.10
REFINE THE DETAILS
We want to solidify the forms to make sure
we don’t get anything unintentionally funky going on.
Treat painting this as you would a simple sphere,
even if the Hydra is more complex than that. Make
sure that we’re painting on the good lines, and don’t
hide that layer! They’re our guidelines and we’re
going to paint by them accurately. We don’t want to
leave any traces of outline lying about, it takes away
from the rendering and makes it look unfinished.08
HARMONISE THE COLOURS
With the pillars of our illustration formed,
we’re going to use a quick shortcut to better bring
together the different values here. Select the
Curves tool by clicking the circle icon on the bottom
of the layer interface, this will prompt us with a
graph and two points. Let’s try to play around with
them until we find a good harmony with the
colours. Alternatively, we could select Photo Filter,
but keep it to a low opacity, as it can muddy up the
colours easily.09
ADD HIGHLIGHTS
The major colours are solved: now we can get to the juicy rendering parts. Taking a soft Airbrush
tool, we’re going to imply where the lantern light is highlighting the dragon and debris below him. Be sure to
light up the spaces behind him so that he pops out more and the ground isn’t just a big dark blob!ADD SOME HIGHLIGHTS AND DETAILS
FIGURE OUT HOW LIGHTS AND SHADOWS WILL WORK IN OUR PAINTING(^001) We create a new light source to shine LIGHT SOURCE 2.0
some warm values onto the Hydra that will allow it to pop out more
(^002) Flesh out the areas where the Hydra will LIGHT VALUES
have lighter values on its body, heads, horns and tail
003 CWe deliberately select contrasting ONTRASTING COLOURS
colours (oranges, greens and turquoises) to counter the overall blueish-grey tones
001
003
002
We don’t want to leave
any traces of outline
lying about, it takes away
from the rendering and
makes it look unfinished
DESIGN A CARTOON CREATURE