Am reasonably pleased with this one. Obviously I used DAZ to get the character and pose, then ... painted. The 3D render, being just an old fashioned raytrace, is incredibly boring. The painting is far superior, with a depth and texture the raytrace just doesn't have, and can't have. Given that there is no way that I can get vaguely close to the photorealism of the Genesis figures; and given that I'm pretty much stuck with the tech I have on the desktop for the forseeable future ... PAINT.
And I'm just starting to achieve results which are halfway creditable in Krita. Sure, I'm still doing stuff you could do just as easily in Photoshop, but ... baby steps! Starting to drive the interface with a degree of confidence. From here, we can start to make some headway.
See the column in the background, with the nice marble texture? Hand painted ... and rather than the interface taking me for a ride, I know how I did it, and can therefore do it again!
NEWS!!! Am very thrilled today, because my third short story has been picked up by a fantasy anthology soon to be published in Queensland. The volume's theme is dragons ... always a favorite subject; and yesterday I signed the contract for Pet Shop Dragons, to appear in Hordes of the Great Fire Wyrms: a dragon anthology, in around June, 2019.
This is tremendous news. It marks my third story in print. The first was Pearls That Were His Eyes, a science fiction piece which appeared in Shoreline of Infinity #11, in the UK. Then came Father O'Neill's Confession, a historical urban fantasy in Terra! Tara! Terror!, from Flatiron Publishing in the US. Pet Shop Dragons could also be called historical urban fantasy, in that it's an a/u 1905, without being even 0.5% steampunk.
So nice to be placing stories here and there! In fact, after doing volumes and volumes of art in the last six months, I need to get my head down and write some more.
More soon ... got a lot of new techniques to try out.
