Lava Monsters!

Gah, being sick sucks.  Whatever I got was one of those persistent, never goes away sorts of colds.  Actually kept me down for a few days.  Then if to add a bit of excitement to my week we launched the beta of our new site at work!  No rest for the Wicked

Texturing a painting can be hard work, and I have heard about a hundred theories on how to do it right.  Most seem to agree that the best way is to blend: Texture you paint into the piece, with Texture you apply to the piece.  So what does that mean?

Looking at this image, a close-up of the creatures face, you can see that I outlined some of the cracks in my Lava Creatures lips.  First with larger lines and then with small-lines.  This is an example of painting in my texture.  I already know this guy has a craggy sort of face, so before I even looked at colour I had some of these details laid in.  Now, to me, this isn’t quite enough.

Before I went ahead and used a few custom rock brushing to paint in a texture layer I also went ahead and added some grays into the creatures flesh.  Although Its environment is constantly lit by lava-flows and harsh light, I still wanted to add a bit more of the rock feeling to the piece.  Now for the second step, adding Texture you apply to the piece.  To do this I went ahead a played around with some rock/asphalt texture brushes in Photoshop, painting them in darker or lighter hues over the creatures skin.  I also played with how my layers were blended.

Here is the entire piece with the texture layer already applied to the colour layers.  There is a whole range of Tutorials out there to show you how to use layers and blending types as you work on a piece, but the idea with this creature was not to get that deep into detail.  In the future I will outline some of my techniques in a series of simple tutorials.  I have a tendency to flatten my layers as I work, committing to the changes I do make as I make them.  This is not something I have seen a lot of other people do, and I was taught not to do it, but to me it feels right and helps my art evolve on its own.

As you may have seen, I also went ahead and painted the eyes in, more details like this will start to appear on the piece as I move towards finishing it.

-TheGrav

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