Diabloceratops Polished a bit….

I enjoyed my Diabloceratops speed paint but  after taking another look at the reference pictures from over on Archosaur Musings I wasn’t happy with the proportions. So being unable to leave well enough alone and quite liking the diabolical appearance of the animal I spent around an hour generally messing around with the speed paint, moving bits, painting over and adding detail until I got it looking more like the pictures.

I worked in black and white again but did a final overlay layer with some colour for fun. This is a really common technique in Photoshop work, and to be honest I really don’t like it.

Since it literally just overlays transparent colour on black it ends up looking muddy and lifeless. To me it’s a signature ‘lazy Photoshop technique’ , throws some colour on without any of the richness from underpainting or consideration for well, the use of colour!

So with that in mind and general laziness setting in I played around with colourising the tonal image using a textured colour layer in the hope of a livelier result.  After a whole couple of minutes of messing around here’s the outcome:

It’s better than the usual result but I still think it’s a pretty naff way of adding colour, there’s enough grey coming through from the original image that the colours are still quite dead. If I try it again I’d look at colourising the tonal image more specifically, or actually starting in colour.