I begun a quest to "Repaint" old heavy metal album covers.
I've been painting this little fellow for two days straight without much rest and my brain is fried (kinda half assed some parts). I can't think at he moment so if someone could tell me what I messed up at. like proportions, lighting, etc. please don't nitpick to death. I'll upload the original image and my version. I'm sure you can tell which one is which.
To me it seem like you didnt put enough time to think about the composition one par of the picture is really uninteresting for the eye and it the bottom right part(some flame(cool) a dragon leg(boring) and a ''background''(nothing to catch the eye).The dragon tongue as vanish or it me?You can also try to add more vitality to the eye of the dragon i am sure you can find some tuto about that.
(12-29-2013, 09:32 AM)darktiste Wrote: To me it seem like you didnt put enough time to think about the composition one par of the picture is really uninteresting for the eye and it the bottom right part(some flame(cool) a dragon leg(boring) and a ''background''(nothing to catch the eye).The dragon tongue as vanish or it me?You can also try to add more vitality to the eye of the dragon i am sure you can find some tuto about that.
okay.. like I said I'm more worried about the lighting, proportions, and perspective.
Get some sculpey or clay and just sculpt out a little dragon, really simply, nothing complicated, like a tube with a mouth. then light it accordingly, use toothpicks or wire to get it to stand on its own. It will be worth it to see how the light interacts with the exact pose.
One thing I am noticing about the light is that it's not wrapping around the form, you are using shadow the way I used to use them, but really light wraps and at times just stops.
The knights ankle should be narrower than his knee. Hes wearing armor but it should still conform to the form of his body underneath. Also the lighting on his head from the flame would be much dimmer than the lighting on his foot. This is because fire light diminishes rapidly with distance. Quoting here from James Gurney's book Color and Light "at twice the distance, the light is only one forth as bright because the same rays must cover four times the area. At three times the distance, it drops to one ninth as bright." The rim light from the moon should have a harder edge and be more pronounced. I also agree with the recommendation above to making a model and studying the lighting situation. The light is hitting the dragons whole face evenly which would not make sense with how the top of his head is positioned in relation to the light source.
Other than what's already been mentioned, mine is more for your next paintings. The original has more movement and energy in the poses, even though they were flat side views. Your view angle is more interesting, but your poses are rigid, especially the knight's. He looks like he could be sitting in a chair in a photo studio and not on a fast-moving, writhing up and down with wing beats, fire-spewing beast in the middle of thin air.
I decided to start from scratch and Instead of just painting something head on, I actually drew some sketches this time (while listening to the Rhapsody of Fire discography on shuffle haha). Are any of these good enough to clean up, add some detail, and proceed to paint? should I draw more sketches? Hopefully you guys can tell what is what they're kinda messy.
Couple of quick points. Since you are designing for a cover. You need to leave negative space in your composition for text. If you look at a lot of book and CD covers and the artwork, in the good ones, the artwork has been specifically designed and composed to leave that space somewhere (top or bottom, or both) I think you need to build that in to your thumbs.
At the moment I'm not feeling 1,2 or 3. Not necessarily because they don't have some interesting things going on with the knight pose etc, but compositionally they are all very similar. The head seems too large a major shape with no interesting negative spaces and the castles are shoved off onto an edge. 3 might be interesting if you bring the dragon and knight into the bottom third or 2 thirds of the image only, and maybe have a castle or wings adding some less detailed but interesting background behind them for negative space and the title. 4 is the most different. An interesting perspective , the composition is very symmetrical but that's not necessarily a bad thing, enough space for text.
I think you should do a lot more sketches and try and play with very different ideas instead of minor variations of the same idea, to really explore the subject. And the focus should be on composition at this sketching stage more than anything else.
Also you can try out this technique for thumbnailing. http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/1...nails.html
And another one for understanding very basic value schemes in composition: http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/0...cture.html
Have you gathered any reference besides the original image? Things for compositional ideas, or maybe other metal album covers with dragons or creatures or something? There is a lot of great art out there, may as well use it to help inform your own vision.
(01-11-2014, 09:03 AM)monkeybread Wrote: Couple of quick points. Since you are designing for a cover. You need to leave negative space in your composition for text. If you look at a lot of book and CD covers and the artwork, in the good ones, the artwork has been specifically designed and composed to leave that space somewhere (top or bottom, or both) I think you need to build that in to your thumbs.
At the moment I'm not feeling 1,2 or 3. Not necessarily because they don't have some interesting things going on with the knight pose etc, but compositionally they are all very similar. The head seems too large a major shape with no interesting negative spaces and the castles are shoved off onto an edge. 3 might be interesting if you bring the dragon and knight into the bottom third or 2 thirds of the image only, and maybe have a castle or wings adding some less detailed but interesting background behind them for negative space and the title. 4 is the most different. An interesting perspective , the composition is very symmetrical but that's not necessarily a bad thing, enough space for text.
I think you should do a lot more sketches and try and play with very different ideas instead of minor variations of the same idea, to really explore the subject. And the focus should be on composition at this sketching stage more than anything else.
Also you can try out this technique for thumbnailing. http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/1...nails.html
And another one for understanding very basic value schemes in composition: http://muddycolors.blogspot.co.nz/2012/0...cture.html
Have you gathered any reference besides the original image? Things for compositional ideas, or maybe other metal album covers with dragons or creatures or something? There is a lot of great art out there, may as well use it to help inform your own vision.
Hope that helps.
I'm just doing these for fun and to get some practice so I'm not going to add text to it. Also, I'm really digging the idea of making the head big enough so the knight can stand/sit on it because i want to show as much detail as i can from the knight and dragon head. Can that position work? Here's another sketch, i didn't upload it because it's pretty much the same as #3. but is it any better?
It's pretty much same as 3. How about you sketch the bigger picture with the whole dragon, and then in Photoshop create a 50% opacity layer with a square hole in it, then drag it around, make it bigger or smaller, to test frame your dragon head and knight? I suggest sketching the rest of the dragon because it helps put the head and rider in context, and have the motion of the whole link and carry into the visible part.
If the dragon's head is big enough for the knight to sit on, you might only be able to show part of the dragon head so that the knight doesn't appear too small in the image frame. Which could work. A dragon's big head is almost like a landscape.
I did a quick paintover on your original pic trying to stick to your request of "proportions, lighting, etc" Most of your idea is still intact just moving things around and adjusting the pose of the knight and the dragon. I also painted over the eye as it did lack in life as pointed out by darktiste. The values and some other things could still be worked on but maybe this will give you a starting point. I hope it helps.
Here's the latest sketch, got bored so drew on some detail. What do you guys think? I think this is it.
And @adam-brown thank you for taking the time to paint something. Made me realize i didn't use my light sources as well as i should have and that metal reflects fire haha
Much better. I'd suggest making use of diagonals more and working the flow of the composition from side to side more. so working in the angle of the sword to point more to the left corner, or maybe to the right corner.maybe tweak the dragon head angles as well and where it lies vertically in relation to the knight. I'm imagining a kind of zigzag motion to the comp down the image. The main shapes are in a block down the middle if the image as it is now, except for the castle.
(02-06-2014, 08:13 PM)monkeybread Wrote: Much better. I'd suggest making use of diagonals more and working the flow of the composition from side to side more. so working in the angle of the sword to point more to the left corner, or maybe to the right corner.maybe tweak the dragon head angles as well and where it lies vertically in relation to the knight. I'm imagining a kind of zigzag motion to the comp down the image. The main shapes are in a block down the middle if the image as it is now, except for the castle.
Got ahead of myself with picture.. again. haha
I think I understood what you meant about the sword, correct me if I am wrong. Excuse my ignorance but i still have a hard time understanding the terminology. I'm just an amateur who not that long ago started painting digitally, I always been able to doodle though. I mean, I still have a really hard time understanding composition.
I'm working on the dragon and knight in grayscale this time.
I see what your trying to do with the angle of the castle in relation to the sword... but if the castle is perpendicular to the ground that would mean that the dragon is flying at like a 90 degree angle... if that makes any sense. Anyways, I just feel like the rider would be falling off at this point.
Also, I would show the rider actually holding the reins you have on the dragon, just to do something with his other hand.
Instead of tilting only the castle, it will help to also tilt the dragon and the knight (and tilt the castle back a bit), so that both of the elements tilting combine to make that angle will give a much stronger sense of motion.
There's really no other way around your foreshortening problem but to find good reference photo for it... keep digging on the internet. Rotate your entire image to align the castle vertical, and check if it's possible for the knight to remain seated on his mount at that angle. Also look for reference image of horse rider or shampoo advertisement for that hair-billowing-behind-head look. At the moment the hair seem to be falling towards gravity that's off to the side.
![[Image: dragon.jpg]](http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/ii284/darkleap/dragon.jpg)
