01-25-2016, 01:24 AM
Hey man, friggin awesome dragon, such a great drawing and so much drama! I'm not as accomplished at painting as you but some things I picked up from Schoolism's Painting with Light and Colour course recently that might help you (if you have the $144 dollars for a years subscription, it's a really great course for pushing in those areas).
So basically, it's thinking about 'exposure' - deciding if you want to expose for light or dark, which area do you want the viewer to see more of. Then choose a value range - if exposing for light, keep the light and mid value areas closer together on the value scale and have the darks really dark, almost crushed together. If exposing for dark, have the darks and mids closer together and the whites pretty burned out with little detail in them.
For your painting, for me, I thought to expose for dark would be interesting since there is the shape of the body going around the corner that shouldn't be lost. I used some adjustment layers to lift up the pverall level of the blacks, and darken the mids so they are close together, but not so so dark in the darkest parts like you had it, then left the whites alone but limited them to the face / neck and the nearest rocks (to keep the light / dark / light pattern and make it feel more like the dragon is coming towards us).
This was a really quick and dirty example but hopefully you get some ideas from it. Basically just limiting the high contrast to select areas, not going so dark and using very slight value changes in the lower end of the value scale (a lot of old masters paintings have a very tight value range in the darks, you can show a lot with just tiny movements on the scale when it gets down the bottom).
![[Image: SmfylQG.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/SmfylQG.jpg)
Hope there is something useful in there : ) hope I can draw an awesome dragon like that someday ^^
So basically, it's thinking about 'exposure' - deciding if you want to expose for light or dark, which area do you want the viewer to see more of. Then choose a value range - if exposing for light, keep the light and mid value areas closer together on the value scale and have the darks really dark, almost crushed together. If exposing for dark, have the darks and mids closer together and the whites pretty burned out with little detail in them.
For your painting, for me, I thought to expose for dark would be interesting since there is the shape of the body going around the corner that shouldn't be lost. I used some adjustment layers to lift up the pverall level of the blacks, and darken the mids so they are close together, but not so so dark in the darkest parts like you had it, then left the whites alone but limited them to the face / neck and the nearest rocks (to keep the light / dark / light pattern and make it feel more like the dragon is coming towards us).
This was a really quick and dirty example but hopefully you get some ideas from it. Basically just limiting the high contrast to select areas, not going so dark and using very slight value changes in the lower end of the value scale (a lot of old masters paintings have a very tight value range in the darks, you can show a lot with just tiny movements on the scale when it gets down the bottom).
Hope there is something useful in there : ) hope I can draw an awesome dragon like that someday ^^