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Foxofwonders β A great friend is the best gift there is
#dragon #magpie
Published: 2015-12-24 15:10:17 +0000 UTC; Views: 746; Favourites: 31; Downloads: 7
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Description
...and you are one of them, drosera-sundews ! (And several other readers here as well. ;D)I wanted to make something special that you could hopefully use somewhere, so this is what I made. A traditional (ink) drawing, digitally coloured and shaded, and with a transparent background (I hope I didn't miss a spot! I erased the background manually. :'D)
Not one of my typical works, but I hope you like the surprise, anyway. ^^ (Also I couldn't not add a magpie. Sorry not sorry. xD)
(Also, I've still no clue if the dragon is jump/running or lying down. I intended the latter, but then I saw the first and couldn't unsee it.)
For 's Secret Santa event.
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Comments: 16
This looks great, I really like the poses and the dragon's expression
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Wow, what a cool thing!
I love the poses and the composition here, as well as the dragon's expression! And the style with the inked lines and digital colours is very neat. You must have been really patient when erasing the background manually o:
(Also, am I just blind or does the magpie have only one leg? xD)
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Thank you. c:
The area around the teeth especially took quite a bit. xD
(Shhh (you're absolutely right), I tried drawing the other one first, but it simply wouldn't look right somehow, so I ended up leaving it out.)
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(Haha, well I gotta say that the one leg that there is looks pretty damn good!)
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That looks lovely! and I couldn't agree more: nothing beats having a friend
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Thank you! Colouring something digitally did make me wonder, however... how do you colour something when the colouring isn't simple? How do you create nice gradients, or even find the right colours? How do you make sure the colour isn't the same everywhere? Seems pretty hard to me. xD
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You are welcome! 
Well, I usually start with a vague idea about the colours I want to use. Usually they contrast a bit. Blue and red, yellow and purple... something warm and cold, but not so saturated that it will hurt my eyes. I start painting rather roughly first, with a soft, but 100% opacity brush. Then I set opacity to 50% or so, and paint with one colour over the other colour. Then I use the eyedropper tool on that freshly painted bit, to get the blended colour. Then I paint with that for a while, then use the eyedropper again, then paint, eyedropper, paint, eyedropper, paint... You get the point 
With a low opacity brush you can add some subtle changes in colour too. What you also can do is make a new layer and set it to 'overlay'. It's a bit hard to describe what that does, but it's good at making mid-tones either lighter or darker, and add a bit of colourburn. You need to play around with it for the first time, but when you get a feeling for it, it's great to make colours a bit more dynamic
Picking colours right in one go is pretty hard, and I often fail at it. You can change colours though in various ways: there is an adjustment called 'hue/saturation' in which you can adjust colours, and make them brighter/greyer. You can also do this 'manually' by setting your brush in 'colour' or 'multiply' mode, and use the dodge and burn tools. It might feel like cheating, but it does give you greater insight about how colours work when you play with it. What works, what does not... and it will make you better at picking colours
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I see! It sounds a bit difficult at first, but I bet it would be fun to experiment with, too. Thank you very much for your advice.
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nothing goes easy eh? but it's fun indeed 
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D'aaaw Fox they look adorable 
And transparent? YeeeeS!! Oooh Fox can you teach me how to put this on my page? Like you did with that portrait of Dynaisjia? Do I just paste the :thumb code?Β
Haha thank you so much, dear ^^ You always manage to surprise me!
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I used the bigthumb code that Gewa mentioned earlier, but I should give that other code a try, too.
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It worked
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You can use the thumbcode (I recommend to use the "big" thumbcode instead of the small one: :bigthumbNUMBER: )
Or the best method is to use this code, because you can choose the size which should be displayed^^ - <da:deviation width="450" id="408051943">
Just change the number behind width to change the size. And in "id" you put just the number of the thumbcode.
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It workedΒ Β Thanks a lot you two ^^Β
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