TABASCO baby dragon creation demo

Hello! Welcome to my first artwork post here! I thought I'd post the development of the TABASCO® baby dragon promotional piece for anyone interested. Thanks to all the positive responses to this piece on facebook and elsewhere including the reposts (with credits, of course:P)      The initial thought I had was to mix some of the lure the fantasy art I've been inspired by lately at CGSociety with my roots in advertising art. I'd always rather tell a story with my pictures rather than make a picture without a specific purpose in mind. Art for art's sake has it's place for sure,but I'm hardwired by now to try for commerical viability, even in a sample piece. Speaking of that, buy a print or gift here: HERE!

So here's the first pre-reference thumbnail sketch I did. It's pretty uninformed, but it's an idea "hatched" so to speak. As you can see, the first sketch was flopped.    I'm including a couple more iterations of the rough sketch along the way in case its interesting to see its evolution. As is sometimes the case, there are things looking back that I wish I would have kept in the final design, but live and learn.

I got a little more reference in front of me. gathering up lizards and dragons. While I kind of liked the feeling of the "gooey frog hands" on the bottle from a tactile point of view, I thought it would take away from the realism of the piece in the end. And since baby dragons are real, this is really important :P

    I was still struggling a bit with the angle of the head here. this sketch is pretty cartoony, but there's something about the contact and intimacy between the dragon and the bottle that I miss now, honestly.
    I tried to get the head positioned in a way that I thought was more possible for a dragon/lizard and moved more towards the boney looking hands of our real lizard friends.

This version has some pretty substantial "fins" all the way up to the head, which I later toned down for the sake of the little ears which I liked to pick up the wing material. It's my world right? I decided against the pupils at this point also because they just looked goofy to me.

I've started to develop the light direction at this point, which is the primary reason I flopped the piece. I wanted the light to lead into the picture    So here's the line drawing over the beginnings of my underpainting. I like to paint into a mid-tone grey with a relevant tint depending on the subject matter. I paint with white mostly, unless there's an obvious color light source if I just don't want to fight the grey as much later in the process. in this case I couldn't resist "screening" out the pink translucency in the wings and ears as well as the sub-surface light in the tail fins

The critical stage of the scales is accomplished by assembling/and or cloning photo assets to combine with the basic form rendering using a combination of Multiply and Luminosity mode overlays (see gif below)

Continuing with the under-painting, I've decided to enhance the red reflective light that the bottle might throw since it's the star of the show. The effect is subtle in the final, but it's part of the mix.

Here's the build stages starting with •BaseColor •Underpainting •Combined •Finishing Effects

Here's a detail shot of the head. That's it! I hope you found this demo useful, enjoyable, interesting or some combination of those. I always enjoy seeing how the other half works, and I hope you do also. I figure we all make each other better artists that way. Till the next time! John :)

So, I've used this little guy as my inspiration recently to go ahead and explore some gaming tools and learn the pipeline on my personal time. 

It's been a great experience, and while I'm sure it makes sense to divide all these tasks across a team of people who can do these things more proficiently, learning what others need to do in the pipeline always informs whatever part of the job you choose to specialize in. Here is the project, if you're interested.

 Thanks again for following! Project Link: