monsters

Creepy creatures from the depths of my imagination

A suggestion of an idea from my mum who at the time was writing a story about a Macaroni man with a story lodged in each pasta recepticle. I had already rendered such a monster but thought that I could not do a little better. This is one of the few pieces that I specifically created a sticker brush for to easily define the macaroni pieces.

Taking some old pieces of Alien art and combining them into something new. Trying to stay faithful to my original pen drawing that I did a very long time ago by layering my previous alien paintings over the top. In the end I was quite happy that I achieved the correct texture balance and gave the alien I slightly different hue. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Of course I started with an Ewok reference with the initial aim of adding this to my Star Wars gallery, but half way through I wasn’t really feeling it, so had a little fun to create something else that possibly might reside on Endor! Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A lot of this painting was spent in Krita and following a simple reference of a squirrel, I went quite a way with it until I couldn’t quite get the composition right and in the end brought the warp tool out to create a slightly different creature. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

I was playing around with the idea of a monster montage and a rough idea using a hard airbrush, after a while I started to feel some kind of zombie coming through, as it the usual with me!. Towards the end I think I cropped a little too much and should have been braver to keep an earlier idea to show more. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Again started using Krita and based on a reference of a little cute own ornament. I am currently liking starting with a very zoomed out view to almost thumbnail the start of the painting which seems to lay in a good foundation. I am using this to get more familiar with Krita as I am thinking about replacing GIMP with this tool as it is a little more user friendly and is being continuously updated.

This started life as a pelican and I added some rim colour dodge to turn it into something else! If I am struggling for a background then I typically copy, duplicate the foreground scale up and move around a little to fit it in, works every time! Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art! This time a weird parrot sea monster thingy :)

Started as a painting from a parrot reference, but during the initial render I got a little bored so I started to add an edge to it and then completely change the colours. At one point it was going to be a phoenix, but I didn’t really like the colours so I changed them up to be a little cooler. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Using a Buffy painting as the base and playing around with texture and the palette knife.

This was a rework of an original piece that I had painted on my rucksack when I was younger in acrylic, I thought it might be a good idea to give it a digital paint over. I decided to completely redo the lighting from below to give a more creepy atmospheric vibe. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Something very strange, I just was having fun and playing around with just about all the tools in ArtRage.

Sometimes I like to take a reference of an innocent children’s toy and then tweak it to extraordinarily creepy levels. I chose to start the painting using the thumbnail technique as to get the proportions and ideas down early saves time later on. At one point the colours became quite muddy and I couldn’t quite work out where to go, but a little overlay of my Daenerys painting, as is often the way got me back on track again.

A spliced painting taking my dragonfly painting as a background and then the lizard painting to adapt into a dragon, this gave me the opportunity to experiment with the ArtRage editing tools.

An amalgamation of several paintings I had previously finished. I initially started with a simple rendering of a bee, but I was struggling with working out a background, I tried many flower sticker sprays but it just didn’t fit the style, at which point I decided to overlay an alien which gave me more of a dragon vibe. The final touch was to define the fire (colour dodged of course).

This painting changed quite a lot during inception as originally it was supposed to be a child of the forest from Game Of Thrones, but I was struggling with the oil brush in ArtRage and things were getting a little muddy. At which point I started to Warp and out came a demon baby!, the final touch was an overlay of blue which gave me the chance to colour dodge orange the eyes to give a nice contrast.

A fun monster, overlaying many of my previous monsters combined with the use of the Warp tool, this turned out to be more of a photo bashing exercise but using my own art. I always find these experiments valuable as it pushes me out of my comfort zone. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

An experiment to adapt my original Spike piece into something else, a troll. My idea was to give me practice with the newly introduced Warp tool. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

This painting was based on my airbrush based Spike portrait as I wanted to experiment with the warp tool and to apply a few more textures.

This painting ended up being quite the experiment. I started off by mangling a manga portrait I had already completed using the Warp tool in ArtRage and figuring things out as I went and seeing what emerged. What emerged was some weird horrific cyclops type creature! Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

I took a piece I had originally finished with the aim of turning it into something very weird using as much image manipulation as possible to see what I could come up with. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

The main inspiration for this painting was my weird squirrel dancing fur ball, I thought that I could push the colour and as it turned out it looks a little ore like Danger Mouse!

Another one of my hybrid creatures from old paintings, taking the alien queen and then combing a unicorn to form somewhat of a potent mixture. These kind of experiments really give me the opportunity to experiment with the features of ArtRage and also get a feel for the blend modes. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

I wanted to go very digital with this painting and create a metallic type monster, almost a zombie Megatron! This was one of the paintings that was chosen to feature in an art book of short stories.

I decided to go all out on using the new ArtRage warp function by seeing what I could create while getting a feel for it. I started from a reference of a woman as normal and then started to distort and see where my imagination took me, as it turns out it took me somewhere very very strange. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Taking some texture and then overlaying a face to get the sense of a horror face emerging from some lava pool of texture.