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I can honestly say... I had no idea what the heck I was doing! It was one week before the deadline of the FDP contest, and I needed to whip up something. Plus, I also just saw the Discovery Channel special on the bizarro PreCambrian lifeforms.
This is part of a triptych, with "Dragonfly's Treasure" and "Dragonfly's Flight." (see next pages.)
Fractal Design Painter 4, Photoshop 3, Kai's Power Tools 2, Ray Dream Designer Studio, CorelDraw
Since I had no clue what I was doing, I just started
fooling with KPT's Fractal Explorer. This is one of the presets, though
I moved it around and zoomed in. Hint: when using presets, remember
to turn off "Draw Gradient Across Top." (Kai's a Graphix God, but if
I ever meet him, we're going to have a little discussion about his preferences
for defaults...!) Also, if you're recording an FDP session for playback,
forget it. It can't handle the KPT Extensions.
Step two is usually Apply Surface Texture. A little
softening and slider tweaking made the red parts look kinda like lilypads
with tentacles. Cool!
Now, if I just had a pond surface to float them on.
I broke out the Magic Wand to grab the black in-between areas. I
used to love FDP's Magic Wand, but lately it's been temperamental. This
time, fortunately, it worked very well. I also discovered the
Secret to painting water. I used the Image Hose to
spray in a layer of pebbles. KPT came to the rescue again: I
found a good, smooth, ripply water surface texture (after changing it from
the fool default of 96x96 to "Tile Size of Selection." Kai is Graphix
God, but if I see him, I'm gonna have to hurt him). Changed to greyscale
and converted to a paper texture, it is VERY handy.
First, apply Surface Texture, using very high softness
and the paper grain. This gives a watery-lighting look. Then,
apply Glass Distortion and --hot dog!-- some serious water.
I created the dragonfly in RDD4. The head and
tail are extruded ellipses with envelopes. The thorax is a custom drawn
shape. For the thorax and tail patterns, I exported 2 KPT purple and
green textures. The head has a basic plastic green shader.
The eyes are spheres, disproportionately resized, and
the antennae are duplicates of a circle on a crooked path. The eyes
have a swirly purple colour, and I created compounding by using a wires setting
in the bump channel. (Uh, of course, you can't see that detail in the
picture.)
Each leg is one shape, a rounded-wedge cross section
on a 4-point pipeline extrusion. The extrusion path is bent at each
joint. Then the envelope is freely modified to shape the leg sections.
Big Hint: If you're going to use anything but a straight extrusion
path, move the path first, then add the envelope. Don't
try it the other way around.
I placed the 1st leg, duplicated, moved and rotated
the second, then hit duplicate again. If you duplicate without letting
go of the object, it will copy the relative movements, too.
Sometimes this is helpful. The third leg is slightly larger
than the other two, and angled on a slant from front to back. A Duplicate
With Symmetry on the group gave me three legs for the other side.
For the wings, I drew the basic flat shape and
made the extrusion very small, then duplicated it for each wing. The
3D model needs more work on it's wing's colour and texture. For these
pictures, I used a semi-transparent plain white wing.
I rendered the view of the dragonfly to a 'Shop
PSD file with a mask. In FDP, the mask (with some tweaking) let me
select the dragonfly as a floater, with the transparency of the wings preserved.
Previous efforts to paint a dragonfly floater with gel wings were not
very successful (see "Dragonfly's Treasure")
I positioned the dragonfly over the big lilypad and,
with some trial and error, gave it a drop shadow. (FDP really needs
a graphical shadow filter, or a preview at least!) I selected the shadow
(it's a floater, too), and gave it a slight rotation. This brings the
tail up higher off the 'pad and makes the shadow bend nicely over that lip.
(Sometimes I even amaze myself!)
To frame my lovely work of art... I only wanted
a huge, glossy marble slab. This is where CorelDraw comes in (I could've
used PhotoPaint, but that program irritates me. Besides, the size I
was working, it would only let me create a portion of the image! Grrr.).
Fractal Fills rule! I got some Fractal 5-Colour Mineral stuff,
and tweaked and tweaked the colours, and filled in some huge rectangles with
different variations. These I exported as TIFs.
In 'Shop, I put the dragonfly image on top of the marble,
in it's own layer. I played around with the edges of the marble and
picture, in an attempt to give it some dimensionality. Well, it's subtle.
I sprayed the marble with some lightening colour for that glossy sheen.
It's not half bad.
The text was set in 'Shop. I put each line in its own layer. The fill is a KPT gold gradient with the brightness/contrast hopped up to make it shinier. The drop shadows are simple copies, feathered, placed on lower layers and filled with transparent black.
copyright: ©1996 All rights reserved. You may download this image for viewing on your computer. You may NOT print it, upload it anywhere, use it for a commercial or non-commercial illustration or companion piece, place it (or a link to it) on your web page, without requesting and obtaining PRIOR permission from the artist. For contact details, click here.
price list: This image is not currently available as a print. Hopefully it will be soon, along with the other pieces of the triptych. If you are interested in obtaining a print, please let me know. It will print at approximately 5 x 8". For contact details, click here.