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Artwork (Digital) / Fantasy
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deaconchaos was extremely patient in waiting for his sketch at Rainfurrest this past weekend, and I promised him I'd put some digital shading into it gratis, since I had to take it home to finish. After about two hours, I'm fairly pleased. . . it's certainly not perfect, but lightning is new for me. Hella fun to do, though!
Category Artwork (Digital) / Fantasy
Species Dragon (Other)
Size 1155 x 789px
File Size 138.6 kB
Saw this, thought it was awesome, and just wanted to try to give some help (and just general trivia) with the lightning, if you wanted it.
When an arc tries to form, it will follow a fixed path (that the electric field determines), and ionise the air particles along the way, to create a string of electrons for a current to travel down (like a wire creating itself by ripping the electrons out of the air molecules).
Lightning produces two main types of arc, depending on the proximity to nearby conductors - sometimes the path will lead to an obvious conductor and the arc channel will open up and strengthen, making it a lot brighter and thicker.
Sometimes the arc will just follow a winding path through the air, until it loses too much energy to ionisation and all the air molecules in the path take back their electrons, so the channel collapses - these arcs are a lot thinner and shorter lived, and sometimes translucent, in particularly low power arcs.
Applying this to the picture, certain arc thicknesses will all have the same brightness/opacity, and there seems to be some quite thick arcs that are for some reason still fairly translucent. As for the places where the lightning enters/exits, you've drawn a sort of 'envelope' around the spines as if the air around them is heavily ionised as well, when realistically the lightning would come out of the tips, where the electric field is more focused due to the highly curved surface at the very tip (this diagram should help explain it). Otherwise everything else about it is great! (including the shapes of the arc paths) :P
And yay for science! (or boo for science if I bored you to death)
When an arc tries to form, it will follow a fixed path (that the electric field determines), and ionise the air particles along the way, to create a string of electrons for a current to travel down (like a wire creating itself by ripping the electrons out of the air molecules).
Lightning produces two main types of arc, depending on the proximity to nearby conductors - sometimes the path will lead to an obvious conductor and the arc channel will open up and strengthen, making it a lot brighter and thicker.
Sometimes the arc will just follow a winding path through the air, until it loses too much energy to ionisation and all the air molecules in the path take back their electrons, so the channel collapses - these arcs are a lot thinner and shorter lived, and sometimes translucent, in particularly low power arcs.
Applying this to the picture, certain arc thicknesses will all have the same brightness/opacity, and there seems to be some quite thick arcs that are for some reason still fairly translucent. As for the places where the lightning enters/exits, you've drawn a sort of 'envelope' around the spines as if the air around them is heavily ionised as well, when realistically the lightning would come out of the tips, where the electric field is more focused due to the highly curved surface at the very tip (this diagram should help explain it). Otherwise everything else about it is great! (including the shapes of the arc paths) :P
And yay for science! (or boo for science if I bored you to death)
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