Sula's Sketchbook

[Ursula Dorada]

So guys!

You saw yesterday the problem I faced with that neckpiece on that color study, right? How I never managed to get it down decently in the time limit.

So it happens I spent some time thinking the problem over, and I arrived at a pretty decent solution. This was my result after 15 min of rework:



The long time solution to this was to draw each scale and smartly make the layers work on top of each other. That would have given me a million layers, which is something I avoid with all my strenght on my daily studies.

So, I remember they introduced that weird brush mode called "behind", that was introduced a couple of versions ago. It paint only on transparent pixels - as if you were painting on a layer behind the current one! And there you go, I was able to block in the scales in less than 10 min. Start placing the top most ones, branch from there. Mind the shapes!

Now, on top of that a multiply layer to lay down shadows (don't forget to vary temperature of the shadows there!), both big volume shadows and the little drop shadow between a couple of scales... And add some highlights now. It is a faster way to get a much better result - I am pretty sure it will come in handy for hair, feather and fur at some point, so I decided to share :D