Noctem-TenebrisArt

sʏʀᴀɴᴏᴛʜ ᴘʀᴏɢʀᴇssɪᴏɴ

Added 2025-08-15 19:55:54 +0000 UTC

Embric Introspection || Through fire and flames

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Intermediate (Art Level)

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Materials needed
Photoshop, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, or any other painting program that suits your preference.

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Greetings, my lovelies, I know it has been a while, but I wanted to break down this intense illustration for you all. I went through quite the tribulation, and yet there was a lovely victory at the end of this blazing tunnel. Forgive me, I feel punny regarding flame-related jokes, as it felt like I went through a gauntlet of them while working.

But I shall help you lovelies through this journey so that you may find a better solution faster than I on your travels through the canvas.

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Since the beginning, this piece gave me more trouble than I initially anticipated in conveying this character's anatomy along with their scale patterns and designs. All the while, I had to ensure I kept a certain feeling with them as requested by my client.

While I made several thumbnails, they chose one that fit their desires, and while I initially drew, inked, and had the flat colors down, the more I looked at this version-

So I went back to sketching it, fixing anatomy that felt like it fit the slender yet powerful body that my client's reference sheet conveyed as opposed to my initial, more blocky first attempt. I was also not at all pleased with how I handled his scales initially, so I completely redid and rectified their patterning for a more natural feeling to them.

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Once the sketch, inks, and block-ins were redone, I was able to make ample progress with the shading before I came to another minor conundrum given the shapes of their scales.

I did several takes here regarding how I wanted to shade them, and yet recently I've been getting back into my TCG collecting (TCG stands for Trading Card Game), and one of my favorites is Yu-Gi-Oh. Now, why is that important? Well, I've drawn a lot of their monsters in my youth, and even in my young digital art career, and a monster I used to draw a lot came back to mind as a reference for these more bold looks and scales.

The Fabled Red eyes Black Dragon

I was able to reference and see how the tail plates were done and apply this technique to these more solid plates, even though I was not doing cell shading with it. It gave these plates far more depth, and I was able to make further progress till I finished the overall work with the dragon itself.

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The background was indeed its monster, and while I sometimes do photobashing, given the needs it required, I ended up painting a whopping 90% of it. I used the mock-up of mountain brushes and some stock photos to get the initial idea, and then from there proceeded to paint my environment of this volcanic hell.

Now, how does one take your base stock photo and change colors, mood, and lighting, etc?

For this one, I used several functions within my Photoshop, namely desaturated all the images to a monochrome, then applied colors using

Curves
Hue- Saturation
Color look up
Color adjustment layers

And then I merge everything, and begin to paint using one of my favorite brush sets that I label as one of my all-purpose sets-

LoranDesore brushes (Free)

This brush set helped me with painting the rocks, the lava, the clouds.

Other brush sets I used were:

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And so this was a little insight into this piece. I hope you all enjoy this little blurb. Please let me know if you'd like me to go more in-depth in anything in the future.

Cheers,
Noct 🐦‍⬛