Oh...My...God
I did it
This, everyone, is my first true digital painting. Not one mark in this image was done by hand, 100% digital! Just me, my computer, and the WACOM tablet. And it came out looking sooo good! I am so proud of this! (I printed out a copy for myself! heee!) It actually looks like it was painted!

For those who don't know what this is, this creature is a black dragon. The dragons in one of my worlds are covered in fur rather than scales. His name is Chaerius, and he's a servant of Fate. He's from my comic: [link]

The interesting thing about it, I found as I worked, was how much LIKE painting the process was. This took a LONG time to do (around 25 hours), and a lot of layers were required (I think there were 18 layers just composing Chaerius alone, about 30 altogether.) But it never felt like it was moving slowly to me, because I used to paint fairly frequently, and the methods that I used for this were the same. Put down a base color, do high-lights and shadows overtop and blend for texture. I honestly felt like I was paining again, and using the right filters gave the strokes a kind of chunky look, like paint has. Sometime I'll post the original sketch with some details of the picture so you all can see that.

So very proud of this, it's the culmination of the expermenting I had done earlier with my WACOM (see Scraps section). I'm very glad I did those first, as bad looking as they are.

Now that I know I can do this, I have a few more ideas I'd like to use this style for, but I think I'll wait a little while before embarking on a new one. It took a lot of work, as previously mentioned, and was driven by inspiration, so unless I'm caught up in that drive, I think it would be too tedious to finish (like the many flash projects I've started)