Description

Type: Photomanipulation & Digital Painting
Software: Photoshop CS2, Mouse (No Wacom)
Time taken for completion: 1 month + 1 week

Leviathan & Esednahea took me a whole month and one week to complete. This artpiece has been the most challenging piece I've ever done because I wanted to try something new. With this artpiece I was really focused on details and spent days working on one single detail and until I had accomplished what wanted with one, I would pass on to the next. At first it was meant to be 100% photomanipulation but I told myself, no! lets try digital painting too. So I mixed them both. What I can say is that this piece is more than 50% digital painting. I challenged myself to do this and I feel like I have accomplished exactly what I wanted and I feel very proud with the final result.

Before I started
At first I had a complete different idea for this piece but while I worked on it, new ideas came to me and I started discarting the old ones. At first she was inside a temple, a ruin...surrounded by waterfalls, the only thing you could see from the dragon was the eye, which was lurking through a big whole on a wall. Since I wanted a big focus on the dragon, I removed the temple/walls. I wanted this piece not to be a 100% manipulation as I said but digital painting too. So I went for it, and decided to paint the whole dragon, well in this case, the head. I ended up not not only painting the dragon but various parts of this artpiece as well.

The Characters
Leviathan - The most difficult part in the making of this piece was definitely the dragon. Honestly, I never thought it would take me so much time to paint the scales/skin of the dragon. Because I wanted the dragon to look somewhat realistic I spent more than 2 days trying to achieve that.
First I had a very cartoonish looking dragon. Then the color tone of its skin became a problem but after mixing and bringing colors from the background onto the dragon, I finally managed to get what I wanted. I painted the dragon directly on photoshop, there was not sketching nor scanning in the making of it. I did look at many pictures of dragons for reference though.
Esednahea - The original picture went through an extreme reconstruction. The original stock photo was not big enough to fit the size of the piece but since it was the exact pose I needed I decided to fix it. She was one of the parts of the piece that took a lot of time to do. Her hair...her hair was a BIG issue! I played around with her hair so many times. She had this strange hair do, giving her a look like Princess Lea from Star Wars but then I realized that since it was raining her hair had to be messed up and look wet so I went by the long wet hair and I really really like it.

Resources/Credits
1. A special thanks to Dizzz for being the model and letting me use her. Click here to view the original photo.
2. Thanks to Gladly Stock for providing me with the stock photo of the Tree Trunk. Click here to view the original photo.
3. Photos of Ferns & Leaves from Stock Exchange.
4. Brushes - my own.

Painted Parts
Dragon, Rocks from the middle & front, Rain, Water, What she's wearing, Her hair, The Sword and Background.

Awards
Leviathan & Esednahea were awarded with a DD (Daily Deviation Feature) from DeviantART.com on May 25, 2006.