TBOFS CONTEST TOP THREE WINNERS

Another 4 designs from the past few months.

Species combos: purple gallinule/African wild dog, black and white hawk eagle/giant panda, hooded crow/striped hyena, and purple gallinule/maned wolf.

Will upload more later.

Weevil (Pachyrhynchus cabrasae), family Curculionidae, Philippines

photograph by Frank Deschandol

Two redos of old art of the same creature combinations. First one is quercylurus/dromaeosaurid, second is pakicetus/halszkaraptor. Might recolor that one, I'm not getting enough attachment to the current design.

Seems like these designs I made previously are relevant again, please feel free to use them.

The last one was just an inspiration from seeing an eagle being harassed by a raven, but some people have said it’s appropriate, so here you go.

Stay safe out there 💕

Some designs of griffons that I've done before. Technically they were me figuring out a character for the Girfugol ARPG, but there's a slim chance I'll actually use any of these.

Species combos: dromeosaurus albertensis/Quercylurus major, yellow bellied sunbird asity/tufted pygmy squirrel, African skimmer/oriental cat, and Anchiornis huxleyi/Yoshi garevskii

This is part 1, I'll show off more designs.

DUUUDDEEE your art is insane!! I ADORE the scales you draw and render, and how you make so much of your illustrations look like real work staff from WoF would make! Do you have any tips for scales? Rendering? Drawing them :0?

thank you so much!! for scales, i'd recommend avoiding circle shapes and instead go for a more angular hexagonal shape! it reduces weird gaps in between the scales and makes the texture look a lot more tight-knit and interconnected

as for rendering, i think my best tip would be to start with shadows first. make a shadow layer, fill it in entirely with the base color for the shadows, and carve out the light source by erasing parts of the shadow layer. I've been trying out a new method of rendering which takes a lot less time but gives the same if not better results (using a color layer on multiply above a greyscale render layer with a color overlay to add color to the shadows! i'll go more in depth with this once i have a finished example piece to break down)

and i usually render scales by filling in each individual scale above the lineart to create an alpha mask and i use a clipping group using the mask

scale mask (normal layer mode, 100% opacity)

set to "color dodge" at 40% opacity, additional "shadow" layer (black color layer set to "erase" above the layers in the clipping group) used to create depth!

Gargoyle NightWings is a really unique take and I'm here for it

Nightwing concepts. Going for a gargoyle look

no thoughts head empty

Food for thought here. So Starflight hatched on the brightest night, yeah? Well imagine if his egg was left in moonlight and he hatched with Darkstalker levels of mind reading and future seeing abilities. Being able to dig around dragon's minds and casually look into the future whenever he wanted. It would make for such a cool story. He could serve as an exposition dump or as a way to foreshadow. It would also make the reveal that NightWings don't actually have powers anymore much more impactful as the only one we've seen does have powers. It would be a shock for the NightWings themselves too. Or it could be done with Sunny instead of Starflight. I know this would ruin Moon's whole character and story but my friend and I found this a bit of a missed opportunity. I'm not gonna make this into an AU, but if anyone likes this idea and wants to write about it please do. Or if someone already has, I would love to see that.