Then With a Roar that Shook All Narnia...

Hey everyone,

Last week I came up with the crazy idea to do a digital painting: not a simple practice painting (although it certainly taught me many things), but one that would challenge me a bit more.  I wanted to paint something that I would enjoy working on.  I'm happy to say that it most certainly fit that criteria:

So this is what has kept me busy during the last week-and-a-half or so.  As the painting came closer to completion, I became more and more eager to work on it.  I used an image from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as a reference for the painting.  The biggest problem I had was that I was painting this on my laptop monitor.  Everything looked great, but not on different monitors.  I compared the image on a bunch of different computers.  I found out that I didn't like the colours on the majority of them, hence the colour-correction of the final image.  It now looks more like the painting I initially painted on my laptop.

I figured it would be nice to post my steps through the painting process, so here goes:

A simple sketch: the origin of the whole thing.

I added the basic islands of colour and experimented with the background colour I liked the most.

I moved the head up slightly, just to give the roar that extra bit of power ;)

The rendering begins!

I did some other minor corrections; mainly the tail.

This is where I had saved the best (worst!) for last.  The mane...

They proved to be an interesting challenge, but I'm happy with how they turned out.

 A few corrections in colour, contrast and detail.

 Here I started working on the rocks.  This provided me with some challenges.

 

Some final changes before starting to work on the sky.

And that's it!  I really liked painting this, and I might actually do another one in the near-future.