Caricature Velociraptor (JP style)

[beanarts]

Hello. I'm finally deciding to get to and get involved with this forum, and my first work in progress is this velociraptor.

I'm heavily influenced by the works of Stan Winston, especially his Dinosaur work (though I suppose "Crash" was more behind the actual initial concept sketches?)

I've jotted down a little illustration a few years ago and decided to add some realism to it. The style I'm trying to get is a blend between a semi realistic Jurassic Park style Velociraptor, but giving it a more cartoony edge over all.

This is very much a work in progress, but currently I'm focusing mostly on where to go with the background at the moment.



















Suggestions much appreciated

[dpaint]

The biggest problem I see is you started rendering before you established the light. There is no unifiying sense of light on the figure. Before you ever render detail on something you need to place the line drawing in an environment, better yet start both at the same time. Otherwise it looks like a bad paint over in photoshop. You need to back up and establish the direction of the light source, the type of light source it is and its strength. Then paint all of the objects in the scene by blocking in their darks and lights and then detail at the end.

[beanarts]

True, and thanks for the input. I'm not sure if your talking about the lighting source based on the placeholder background or on the image itself. I may have a few spots with clashing light sources, I was trying to keep that in mind but overall the light is coming from pretty much directly above. However I may have overlooked areas such as teeth, certain scales and muscles that may have their shadows in the wrong areas.

Luckily I always paint the details of the skin, and the shadows, and the highlights on their own separate layers so hopefully that won't be hard to look at.

I am still stuck with the background. I could go just black, or some random background, but I want it to fit with the raptor... And of course I intend to paint it separately so it will have the same light source as the raptor... But it seems I need much more practice drawing and painting environments.

Thanks for the feedback

[Angel Intheuk]

I think placing it in a woodland looks better than a plain background but have a really dense thick jurassic style jungle. Also I don't know if you do this afterwards but there is a bit too much detail at the moment and it's a bit confusing on the eye, maybe desaturate the parts of the raptor farthest from us or blur?

does look good though, you've captured the ferocity but it still looks cute

[Lotet]

aw, how cute