So since someone asked for it, I tried to do a tutorial on my latest picture (thanks for the positive feedback by the way, I didn't expect this and it'S great :) )

Since I never record when I draw I can't put any fancy footage anywhere, but I showed all the different stages of the drawing and what's on different layers, as can be seen HERE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiBozdXEu7E




I started off SKETCHING the dragon, then adding the she-wolf. Since I didn'T know where this picture was going I tried around a little with her positioning (sitting on the dragon or running next to it) until I found what I was looking for.

I added the dress (which took me several attempts, one can be seen in that video)



I cleaned up the sketch to a proper LINEART (and redrew the dress.. ;) )




Next the BASE COLOURS are blocked in, all nice and easy until here. I'm terrible with mixing natural colours, so for base colours I always use these plain and goofy cartoon colours, the magic happens later, because I'm a Photoshop cheater.






After that I start the SHADING, which is the most difficult and annoying part of the whole thing - can you tell I dislike it? ;)

On a new layer (layer mode set to multiply) I start off with a greyish/purple colour, very light.
I put in the first general shadows. Realistic shadowing comes all down to anatomy: You need to know where they have to go to make it look good, sad but true. A little practise will definitly give you the hang of it though. There are lots of tutorials on this, but some short tips straight away:


- Think about whether the shadow you want to draw will have a soft or hard edge. The mixture of both makes things realistic - look around you and figure out how to use it.

- DARE TO BE DRASTIC. Especially beginners tend to shadow very blurry, which saves you an actual decision of whether or not something is in the shade or not, but it doesn't look very good and won't teach you. Dare to put some strong, hard shadows somewhere and look closely to find out if you were right or wrong about your shading.

- going from light to dark and from rough to detailed works best for me

- don't use just grey for shadowing, but an actual colour. Purple, blue, brown, red, they all make good shadow colours, depending on the scenery and thing you want to shade. Try around with them.




After the first layer of shadows I create another one, set to multiply again, and go on with the same colour. I fiddle around with the opacity a little until it looks like I want it to and block in some deeper, darker shadows, usually more defined as well.

(Very important are the shadows she-wolf casts on the dragons shoulder. Without them the two characters would look weirdly glued together and not believable. Note that the shadows are shorter where she is close to the dragon and longer where the distance between her arms and the dragon body gets wider. Again, look around you for reference)



Once the shadowing is done the characters still seem to fall apart and the bright colours don't suit the scene. I picked a dark purple form the background, filled a layer on top of my colours with it and set the mode to multiply. Now it all blends in.





The white bits you see on the dragon are simply little eraser marks from that purple colour layer. REFLECTIONS and shading show the texture of a surface very well - with the extreme reflections and also some subtle reflections on the neck and tail the dragon looks really wet and scaly.





Now I only need to work on the background a bit more. I added the RAIN EFFECT with a simple trick (there are lots of tutorials on this one, and it's dead easy)

Either draw white dots on another layer, then motion blur them extremly at an angle. If you're too lazy for the dotting, go to filters and render clouds. Through another filter add a lot of monochrome noise to the cloud layer, and finally motion blur it as said before. Done.


For the drops that are splashing off the dragon skin I drew a thin line of fine white strokes and dots next to every part of the dragon that was directly hit by the rain (only the silhouette though) and blurred it a lot and lowered the opacity. It's so subtle most people might not see it, but it's there, and it does the trick.


The puddles were simply drawn in with a thin white brush, opacity lowered a little. Less is more, so I only drew the outsides of it and some splashing drops. Again, keep it subtle.


Last but definitly not least I added some water on to the dragon - we're finally getting to the part people asked me about. For these watereffects I just drew on a layer on top of all others with the same thin white brush. Again, you'll want to keep it subtle, so just pick some points where water could be dropping off - the muzzle, the horns, the wingtips and most of all the paws. Imagine the dragon is lifting his feet from the puddles - he will drag water with him that will splash around.
I added some detail views of that in the video. You can see I draw drops coming off the paws in a curved line, as well as some lifted off the ground.

Keep these drops sketchy and light, no detail needed there. And of course there is water dripping off everywhere, but just pick a few spots where it's more distinctive. Done.





:) I hope that helped, if you have more uestions let me know and I'll happily answer you.