Tuesday
Jun152010
Two dragons
Simon Dominic -- Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 1:00 PM Hello Creaturespotting people, a couple of evil dragons I recently completed. Thanks for looking, hope everyone's well :)
Typhon Sorm (c) Epidemic Books
Nidhoggr (private commission)
Reader Comments (8)
Oh lahrdee these are good! I mean come on! So good! The triple-ramhorn? So excellent! Really the character is driving me crazy it's so good. The lower dragon makes me just salivate it's so damn good. Oddly enough, my favorite part is on his exceptionally cool shelled back, where the branch casts a shadow on him. OK so I'm odd.
My one comment is that these, perhaps purposely, are having a little trouble with depth-of-field, meaning the scenes seem to exist on nearly the same plane. It seems mostly to do with the fact that contrast stays pretty strong where it seems that it needs to fade a bit as you recede into the background. Examples are the trees in the lower piece compete with the plane of the awesome awesome awesome new favorite part of that piece tail/body of the dragon. They're sharing very similar levels of value and color as his tail and the foreground trees. I can see they're faded a bit.... but could stand to fade a good bit more. A light wash behind the dragon, of that foggy orange-brown mist would do the trick nicely methinks.
Gawd I love these. Kudos galore.
Hey Mike, thanks for dropping by, really happy you like em both. I must say I do like painting dragons and similar beasts. I'm not asked that often so when they do come around I spend a little extra time on them.
Great point about the contrast, it's something that I always do. In the initial sketch and colour rough the contrast looks good and the characters are standing out but when it comes to colouring proper it seems that more and more high contrast colours sneak in. Next time I might try "washing" with a desaturated colour towards the end if I can't control my contrast in the proper way :)
It's amazing how you manage to pack so much in without confusing the hell out of the viewer, plus make everything readable. Your understanding of lighting, textures and colors makes me envious in ways unimaginable. Were these all done with Art Rage as well? If so, it kind of makes Painter seem like a joke. The new website with its simplistic approach is much easier to navigate and always a pleasure to peruse, even saw some works I'd never seen before. Thanks for posting Simon!
Cheers, Dave :) I sketched both these in ArtRage but used Painter for the colouring. I guess I could have got the same effect in AR but it would have taken longer, that's the price paid for a more "true to life" painting engine I suppose. Glad you like the new site, I felt the old one was getting a bit tired and also wanted to release the geek in me and do some more PHP. Thanks for commenting, Dave.
sweeeeeeet udpates! love seeing your work!!!
Thanks, Devin. Checked out your site too - really nice stuff!
Your rendering and picture-making skills only grow more astonishing with each image you post, Simon! Great work.
Thanks, Cory, appreciated. I'll let you into a secret, though, I only post my best ones. Most commissions are so tight on timescale and low on pay that the results aren't quite optimum. Happily these two allowed for plenty of time to be spent on them.