Space mosasaur again

I went back and tinkered with this one a little bit. I’ve been comparing pictures of gas clouds in space with clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. And they look a lot alike. It’s like particle physics are the same throughout the universe! Who knew?

Well, it sure makes things easier for artists. So I roughed out some big fluffy cumulus clouds and packed ’em full of stars.

Then I didn’t feel like painting the underside of the water’s surface, so I got a pic off Google. Photoshop’s real good at making photos look like a part of your painting, you know?

Now the mosasaur looks all rough. I need to fix him up, and define his starry tail, too.

Orange and gray clouds

These clouds were interesting to paint.

I started with a background, which was a round gradient from orange to gray, sort of like a sunset on a cloudy evening. First I tried using just the Smudge tool to make clouds, but that was taking too long. So I just painted in some cloud shapes, then swirled them with Smudge afterward. I tried changing the brush on the Smudge tool, and got some really great effects. And just with the default Photoshop brushes, too! I had fun making them all varied and cool looking.

Runaway with shading

Here’s all the shading done on an orange and gray gradient. It kind of gives it all a nuclear holocaust sort of feeling, doesn’t it?

I went a bit overboard with the spiffy Photoshop grass brushes there in the foreground. I wanted to see what they could do, so I tried lots of different things. I might just delete that entire layer and do it over again.

Otherwise, I’m satisfied with the way it’s coming along. I just hope Aura likes it, too.

New commission

Starting a new commission! This one is for Aura, who requested a scene from a fanfic where her character is escaping from some kind of evil government test facility. Hence the spotlights. 🙂