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In the last tutorial I showed a step through of all the layers I used to create a dragon. The dragon was part of a series of 4 dragons, and on this page I'll show you a similar outline for one other. At the bottom of this I have pictures of the other two as examples of what not to do and the importance of composition, contrast, and so on.
I tried out a few backgrounds, and this is the one I decided on. While the bottom most layer, it was added towards the end. Again, the point of this is to go through the source images and layers involved. I've already written a couple tutorials on how I collage together multiple images. (Here's the more basic step by step of what you need to know to do this in photoshop)
This is one of the few places in the image that I blended two images together. I tried to limit myself to what I could only do with a pair of scissors to give it a more raw look. (In retrospect adding in some cut paper edges, and other textural effects would be a nice touch in the future.)
Trees. Again, these were added after the dragon in order to bring the picture together.
Houses-same as the trees. Creating an environment is crucial.
Want to show how drastic some needed color changes are. It will start coming together shortly.
Same sort of thing. I got these images off the web and also by scanning a number of books as needed with the plan to distort all the images beyond recognition.
Yay for color changing. I already wrote a tutorial on how to adjust colors.
Used a crocodile as the base of the dragon.
Messed with a bunch of images, and decided on this one of an elephant. Things I keep in mind-Avoid straight line making the seem hard to find, have plenty of lines of continuity (a wrinkle continuing from one image to the next and touches like that), and try to pay attention to consistent tones and light sources throughout. Good source images are everything.
I rotated the elephant horn and used how I cut to create a shadow-imagining a light source from the upper right.
I don't think this layer is seen much in the final image.
More body building.
The reference used for the dragon's belly. If I was drawing a dragon, I'd pull from the same reference, just weaving it together more. Getting nice textures makes a big difference.
Still need to work these into the image. Again, I included the source images.
Rudimentary start to arms.
Each dragon was representing a different season, and this one was Spring-so an egg seemed in season. Also, it's a cool looking set of bat hands.
Another place where I cheated-using the clone tool to reshape the hands image.
More cloning.
Enough with the cloning fix, let's move on to the wings.
I used the wing of a beatle - are very cool creatures worth checking out for inspiration. Bugs in general, for that matter.
Then I copied the beatle wing and rotated it.
Another wing copy.
Fourth and last wing copy-creating a nice shape for the wing that reads as many things, but not beatle wing-which is part of the idea. That white back is completely covered up by now. Good riddance.
Some trees to bring the image together and hide the crappy parts.
Thought I'd give you an idea of some of the images I tried, but decided in the end to not go with. There were more, but I can only overload you with so much ugliness. Those wings I put in at around the start, knowing at somepoint I'd have to replace them. If the hands shown here were better quality I might have stuck with them. The black used for skin (taken from a snake and copied three times) I decided was too dark. The snout...well I found an even better one. I just wanted you to get some idea of choices I turned down.
The final image. Areas worth improving on if I wanted to diverge from the cut paper approach-I'd change the color to get the body and head to match, bring the wing connection into the body more clearly, make the back of the body red as well, start putting in shadows and light with proper brushing on top, and just keep going. While that would be fun, I have neither the time nor the inclination, as the whole point of this series was to see what I could do while staying strickly to lasso and layers and nearly nothing else.
I'm posting the Winter Dragon and Fall Dragon as examples of what can go wrong if not enough forethougt is put into the image.
Here's why this image doesn't work. There's not enough contrast between foreground and background, especially with the black mountain in back. The colors don't get cooler as the images goes further back into space. There's not enough of a recession of contrast from the foreground to the background. In other words, the darkest darks and lightests lights shoud be in the front dragon, but are not. The sloppy cutting of the mountains and even the dragon would be excusable if the lighting was consistent throughout, but in the end with all of these things adding up, this didn't stand a chance of turning out.
I reached this point, and saw it was such a mess I just had to put it down. A good trick is to squint, and if the point of focus is immediately clear, that's good. If you squint at this-it's a horrible mess.
I changed the background, gave him a cigar and sneakers and added in a slew of flowers, which helped, but it still doesn't pass the squint test, an unforgivable sin. This was the last one I did, and by this point I was getting whimsical, and was ready to up the ante and increase the challenge. There's too much going on here with no focus. All of the notes I said for the last few images apply in spades to this as well.
 First Dragon
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