Legacy LD5

This one spawned from an epic roleplay between Bolt (a smug bronze
dragon hidden somewhere in this picture, see if you can find him) and
a white raptor by the name of Ahastar. Bolt placed "his" raptor on top
of his dragon throne, kicking his legs back, planting his paws on top of
said throne and had "his" raptor get to work.

And said raptor licks them with the fervor that only a creature knowing
that slacking off will mean full weight dragon trampling can offer.



And the high resolution version for those that want it/would like to print it.

I really don't know how you managed to keep this a secret from me for so long... I should have smelled so much awesomeness floating across the channel.

But I'm glad that you did because it was a wonderful surprise! Thank you very much indeed! If Bolt wasn't... otherwise engaged, he'd give you a big inescapable dragon hug for rendering him so superbly.

You know, this isn't helping me to resist the temptation to hug the dragon's feet when he meanders upon the square. >.>

Great job with the picture btw. It looks great, if not superb.

Awesome job, Ahastar!

Awesome indeed, fierce white one!
All that perspective, all that details, both of things on the scene as well as how detailed everything is drawn,
must send a trample-lover into foot heaven.
A very Ahastar-y picture indeed.

Wooaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!

What an excellent picture, all the awesome details, the perfect POV and the very nice facial expressions! This picture ROCKS !!!

I love it!

Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks aaaaaaand thanks.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.... look at all that gold!

That's right, Ahas... you keep him occupied like that and meanwhile it's time for me do my work! XD

Awesome picture, bro! One of your best so far, I'd say!

This is so awesome that the image powned my monitor! I would need to have a 30" plasma screen to get that on my desktop heh. I don't even think if my printer could handle it either. Great job Ahaster, you're one my favorite artists around here hehehehe.

nice!

It PAWnd your monitor?

I wanted to catch Ahastar on Faibanx, but having not seen him for a while, I must ask here instead:

I'm dying to know how you did the texturing. It looks like a brush texture (or several overlaying), but its all different scales and looks pinched around the edges. How did you get all the different scaled scales to join together? Is it a pinch tool, or something else?

Yeah, I haven't been on Faibanx for a while since I have been busy as FUCK - I love the hefty amount of German holidays, but they also mean more work on common days with a job like mine, since the amount of work doesn't grow smaller with the days. I will shove my white snout back in again when I am more easy on time. Diablo told me about your chat with him and Caen though, so I know what you mean.

The sacles on the face and neck are hand drawn. The rest was indeed created with a single semi automatic texture brush that I designed for scale-texturing reptiles. It is basically not much more than a brush made out of various hexagons, with the hexagons at the edges of the brush smoothly blurring/erasing out. Since the brush is also programmed to randomly rotate its layout, these edge scales equally randomly "melt" into each other to form complete single scales. That way the pattern remains chaotic at all times. Since the brush is not fully automatic though, you have to lift up the pen after each single brush stroke to apply the scales where you need them and to allow the random layout pattern to "reload", so to speak. You can't simply "paint" over the picture with it like you can with a fully automatic brush.

I don't see anything like that in Photoshop 7. The best I came up with was creating a brush that looked a lot like your pattern (using the stained glass and blur filters), turning it into a brush and then putting it down as a single blob, manually changing the rotation each time.

Not very successful.

Got a better result using the wave filter to apply some random twists to the painted layer.

Still not very successful, but easier.

Yes, a lot of these tools are definitely past Photoshop 7. I still use PS 6 on my work laptop... let us just say that I appreciate it as a picture manipulation tool, but not much more.