Couple Dragon Types

[Jack the R]

http://www.extinctionlevelevent.com/illustration/concept/dragon_airship_thread/gunship_body_03.jpg

http://www.extinctionlevelevent.com/illustration/concept/dragon_airship_thread/binary.jpg

I'll be using these in my portfolio when applying to MB school. How can they be better? I think the biggest problem is lightiing - I feel good about the designs.

I tried using the color overlay technique on the first one, but I've yet to get good color out of it -

http://www.extinctionlevelevent.com/illustration/concept/dragon_airship_thread/gunship_body_03_col.jpg

I'm not sure what the problem is - my values look pretty good as values, IMO, but maybe my eye is fooling me.

[kinjark]

i feel these dragons are wonderful. no errors i can see. the underpainting/glazing method you are using was used by the old masters as well. see how they did it and maybe you could find what you are looking for.

[Jack the R]

I've seen Vyle and Marc Taro's tutorials on glazing. Maybe it would work better if I spent more time on it, but I thought the whole point of painting like this was to save time.

FWIW, I've also noticed the value scale in RGB mode does not directly correlate to the value scale in grayscale mode. If you take a color that has a 100% value in RGB but also a high degree of saturation, and convert to grayscale, it will produce an 80% whitish-gray instead of straight white. Just an observation, I haven't looked into it in depth. It might not mean anything, but I've noticed that, even when the pro's paint this way, it doesn't look quite as good as a painting that started in color.

If I can get the hang of painting in color, perhaps this glazing technique will start working for me too.