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Creatures 2 Creatures 3 Tutorials FAQs My Stuff Other |
This is some of the techniques I use to make norns with fluffy fur. If people like this one, I'll do more for clothing, scales, feathers, etc. =) Also, it's important to note that when doing these arts, you should always make sure that your background colour selection is 0,0,0 black, it'll make you life easier for when you have to rotate and cut things. Rough Sketch All my artwork starts as a rough sketch. You'd be surprised when and where I come up with some of these things. The example in this tutorial is something I did while I was at work... working. It took me all of two minutes to sketch out, in 10 - 20 second intervals. I have a tendency to do a lot of roughs this way, in fact, I have two others I did at work waiting for me to do something with 'em. Anyway, this is what I settled on for this lesson:
Base picture Okay, so I want to build a Wolf Norn. First thing I need is a picture. What I did was build a "J" Norn (Or Alba, or Pixie) with an "H" Norn (Or Hebe, or Brown) head. I feel that the white edging on the limbs and the scruffy tail are perfect for a wolf norn, while the "H" head is awesome for norn art in general. I built this norn using the body part switcher in Cheat Robot, but you can do it just as easily in a program like Gel or CL's Genetics Editor. Once you have your norn made, you'll want Nornpose which you'll use to pose and make your picture. Here's the picture I made, and it even links to a zipfile with the image and the exp of the norn who posed for the shot:
Resources It never hurts to have a picture of what you're trying to make. I often work without pictures as I have a good memory for animals and how they appear.. but every so often, I'll need a picture. For this lesson I've grabbed a picture of a wolf so there will be something to look at. This way, you can see some of where I get a grasp on how the Norn should look.
This picture was found on a public domain photo site... if anyone knows to whom it should be credited, I'd love to know. Now, my Wolf Norn won't look exactly like this, but it's something for me to get ideas from. The nice profile will definately help. Recolouring Now we could just go with a brown wolf.. but I want it to be lighter than this. To pull this off, I'll be using some tools in the Image tab. First off, you want to be sure you have your posed norn bitmap unedited in a folder somewhere. When you open it, it should be your normal posed norn. When you recolour it, don't save it right away... make sure you have your eraser tool set to "Erase to history" on the options window. Also make sure it's set to paintbrush and that the Paintbrush tool has a soft, small brush selected. With that done, you now recolour the norn. Under the Image tab, in Adjustments, you'll find a feature called "Desaturate". Select it and your norn will go stark grey. Go back into the Image tab, under Adjustments, and select Levels. This will bring up a complex little window. Where it says "channels" select red and set the middle input box to 140. Set green and blue to 90. That should give you a light brown. If it doesn't, set channels to RGB and slowly adjust the middle input box to higher numbers until you get a nice colour. Levels is a wonderful tool, I recommend playing with it a little to see what you can really do with it. Once this is done, hit okay and select your eraser. Remember how I had you set the eraser to "erase to history"? Now you'll see why. Gently go back and erase the feet, hands, face, and eyes... now you'll have a whispy brown-furred norn with normal skin.. like this:
Now that you have your recoloured norn, save it with a name that is not what the original Norn picture was called. My original posed norn was Wolfie00, this one is Wolfie01. Then close the image and reopen it. The erase to history feature will now look at this new norn picture when you use it. You may want to save after you complete each step. Each time you save, close the image, than reopen it so the History Eraser will be looking at the most recent work. Also, Photoshop is rather unforgiving.. you're allowed one undo when you make a mistake, so always try to correct your errors immediately.
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