Baby Grazzi is a tiny dragon, curled around a violet crystal, sleeping quietly, little thumb in his mouth. (This painting is specially for Teira.)
Pencil, paper, ink; CorelDraw5, Adobe Photoshop 3, Kai's Power Tools 2, Fractal Design Painter 4
I sketched this in pencil, then inked it and scanned it as a
loose reference. I began with the stone layer in FDP, first filling
everything with a solid grey, then modulating it with the airbrush. A
single pixel airbrush with variable hue/saturation/colour and auto-clone
spattered the flecks nicely. The gold vein is a KPT gradient.
The moss is airbrushed in wide strokes, then modified with noise,
and the watercolour filter sample in 'Shop (now a standard filter in 'Shop
4).
Each item was painted seperately. I used the sketch (a
separate channel) to select each piece and paint it in. Well, it's
simple enough to tell, but it took a long time.
This didn't take nearly so long. I created an outline of the dragon and crystal seperate from the background sketch. This was also inked and scanned in. In fact, I painted the figure in it's own file. I used several layers to get the effect of the crystal's transparency and colour. I airbrushed the figure in 'Shop and fiddled around with umpteen different ways of doing the crystal. In fact, I had two crystal layers, each with different crystals. This one was best.
When both files were ready, I expanded Baby Grazzi's canvas and pasted in the background. This was to preserve the transparency effect of the crystal. Once positioned, I painted the shadow onto the background with a darkening black airbrush.
The text was built in CorelDraw. The G is from some font
or other (sorry, but I don't know all the font names!), but the B is built
from bezier lines drawn with a thick pen. The small letters are the
same font, and they're all slanted to match the B. The B also starts
my name, and my signature started out as a lumpy freehand curve that got
beziered up nicely. I imported all that as a mask into 'Shop and gave
it the ol' gold shiny fill.
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