Scott Grant
Production
Final Design planning
First I'll bring all of the designs I've made before together to reference them while creating the new one.
The primary software I'll use would be Illustrator, at least at first. I'm picking it due to it generally being simpler than Photoshop and so creating the design should be simpler.
If I require more detail in the design then I can also use Photoshop.
Design + Its Layers
While creating the current design I looked through several previous works I've done and mixed them together.
Some of the details like the wires and the inner details with the limbs and necks were made from feedback or created on the spot to fill in space.
The crocodile here is suppose to have a point where it bends around the body area, which is why the tail and the head are in angles while the body looks flat. Personally I feel that the battery's position and with how the body looks like it can't bend. If the body was longer, had a section styled liked to look more flexible and moved the battery a bit more up the body I feel it'd look better.
After finishing the side way crocodile I had to figure out what next to make. I decided to either create a sketch for the context or a frontal face design, I went with the latter.
When I first "made" the frontal design I felt it was too square, resembling more of a frog than a crocodile so for the last part I was editing it all to make it thinner and make the eyes more squished.
Using Photoshop's Select & Mask and Layering
Due to us eventually learning about animating with layers in 3D one of our current tasks is to use Photoshop, using several techniques like Masking to take parts of other images and using them on their own, and playing with the layers for things like texturing and blending.
While working I ran into a good few problems, I had thought we were to use images that covered a A4 size page with a high quality but I couldn't find one that I liked so I continued the process on a smaller image, which I'm still not sure if I was suppose to do.
Some of the images I chose are a bit "sharp" making them stand out and I'm not sure how to help it. And since I don't know how to do several things I can't play with colours, example being with the crocodiles, I didn't know how to change the colours over them to make them blending in with the environment so I had to blend them with preset styles which made them too hard to see.
The biggest problem that I can see while making this is that I don't really get what my idea is, aside from having trees and a factory there isn't much of an idea that I have for the environment and all I've done for this today aside from blending in the pool water is just adding more trees, it's quite aimless and the only aim there is, is bland and doesn't allow much room to play with.
Today though I did figure out about using tools like Blur to blur the layer, and Dodge and Burn to lighten and darken respectively. Which I feel will eventually become very useful because for something like the blended crocodiles I can un-blend them and play with the tools to change them.
Checking Back I decided to change a few of the layers, previously a few of the layers had issues where layers that were to cover other layers had parts of the sky inside of them, making a more awkward appearance when the sky overlaps with the image, to correct that I redid those types of layers by doing the same process with the lasso tool and masking.
I also decided to try correcting some of the lighting and images being too sharp with different tools.
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Recreating the Background
As mentioned previously I was dissatisfied with how certain parts of the image had problems like being too sharp, parts not fitting well, and so on.
Because of that I decided to recreate it using brushes in Photoshop.
Most of the brushes I believe was the "KYLE Ultimate Inking Thick 'n Thin" wet media brush, for the clouds I used a custom brush I made a while ago so I didn't have to.
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Final Piece
Layers
The Timeline. The layers that aren't expanded are that way because nothing was edited with them.
The full Crocodile used, it has an incomplete design because the water covered the important parts.