Oh Mighty Frog King
I was recently working on a sketch that’s been in my portfolio, just sitting there, for a couple of years. I wanted to get to the point where the picture was no longer black and white, and I was getting happier with the mix of colours in the image. I could then move on to turn it into completed concept art. It’s a monster frog of course, and so the colours have to be strange and threatening. The sort of colours you find in a swamp. This monster is one that you might find in a role-playing game, either table top or online, and this is the sort of art needed to give the players a good scare.
This frog monster lives in an evil smelling swamp, of the type found strewn across every fantasy game world for players to adventure in, and that means the picture has to be dark.The way I tend to make an image dark in GIMP – and I’m not saying this is the right way to do it, but it sure is easy – is to add a layer on top of the digital painting and then paint in some nice thick black shadows. Then I turn down the opacity of the layer until the shadows are just the right level of darkness, and bada bing – dark picture.
Now that the picture is nice and dark the next step is to add some splashes of colour to make it a little more attractive. I’m going to give it an Egyptian-style skirt, probably red, and some gold jewelry. The gold jewelry is a little present for whatever players end up having to fight this creature as they are playing their RPG. It’s woot.
