Hey guys,
Every couple months, the Robot art department comes up with a new theme for the art blog. This time around, the theme was “fantasy”. Before I started, I went through my references and found this concept artof a bugbear from Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone by Jeff Murchie. That was my inspirational starting point and then I just added some different elements from there along with the girl.
A few people have asked me to breakdown my process for this image so I’ll do my best to remember what I did. It probably isn’t exact since I flattened a lot of layers that were then adjusted using levels.
I layer all of these together, sometimes lowering the opacity. It’s not an exact science and I never use the same process twice, I just hack it together until something starts to look ok. Scott Spencer’s process is much more thorough and you can learn more from his book. I probably missed a few of the layers he uses (since someone is currently borrowing my copy of the book…you know who you are! 
)
After all my layers were working well together, I flattened everything and used the colored element layer to select all the metal or all the skin and brighten or darken things to sort of balance it all out. I also used a white radial gradient set to “overlay” to put more focus on the face. I then took my zdepth alpha and dropped it into the alpha channel and used “Lens Blur” to get a depth of field effect. (This is also explained in more detail in Scott’s book)
The rest is photoshop touchups, fur, hair, grit and paint on the metal. The grit and paint could have been done with polypainting but I was pressed for time and I know once I get started, I’ll get all OCD and end up painting his back and a bunch of stuff that wouldn’t be in the final image anyway, so I just did it in photoshop.
I hope this was helpful in some way. Thanks for checking out my thread!
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