Dragon Keeper

There are two things that people know me very well know. I have an absolute love of fantasy themes and dragon's in particular. The other is that I also write though I have not posted anything beyond a poem or two in my history here. I may change that in the future but most of my writing involves the level of a novel... I seem to have no problem writing poems or novels, but shorter work doesn't work for me... not yet at least.

This is an image that around the story I came up with recently, called The Dragon Keeper, I may post a first chapter when I write it to give folks an idea of what it is about. I vaguely see this as a book cover concept, which is something I'm starting to work on for all my book concepts now...

So the technical side of things:

I was playing again with fluid mask and in this case the image was perfectly cut out and feathered automagically. It was a nice test of the tool when everything is perfect (which of course most cases it is not). I am still impressed with it in general.

I have been playing with brushes a bit and found these dragon ones... generally I do one layer for a tattoo and blend it in with opacity and layer effects... in this case I did two layers... I did this by accident when I wasn't happy with the color I used for the original... I loved the effect so much I did a second one on her arm for practice sake

The eyes I sculpted a bit off personal resources and tried to blend it into her original eyes which had a teary eyed look... which I loved Think I was able to preserve that affect while adding some dragon eyes like look... more importantly given the position of her eyes I played with the perspective tool yet again to get them angled right...

Lastly I love the stock for the dragon's on the background... going to use it again ... I tried so many variations with different backgrounds that I thought I'd never get done... until I found the background I'm using here and then used layer effects for the dragon's in the bg

Anyways a very very special thanks to the stock providers an often thankless task, but I really appreciate all of them:

- Background
- Dragon BG
- Dragon Brushes
- Model