It's art, not reality, so it's really all up to the artist, but we had an old skull that my mom found out in the desert on a trip to Peru, and the hair was all dry, frizzly, and sparse. That is why I mentioned it.

Exceptional work Jynx_TQ. I apologize for not seeing this thread sooner. I'm not on this forum much, and I tend to miss out on what's going on. Again, really nice work.

Yep, You're right. The dude peeking round the tree is going to be more like that (that's how I've sketched him anyway)



Thanks

Another update (probably the last until Monday evening now)



Cloak/cape finished (I think!?)

OK, I lied, there is another update before monday (can't keep away from GIMP it seems!)
Decided last night that the easiest way to represent chainmail would be with a "brush pipe" so made one this morning. Quite pleased with the initial test.

Wow, that is looking so good! You are living proof that Gimp is a great tool for digital painting.

The chain mail is fantastic looking!

Nearly Almost nowhere near finished, but closer than I was



Not sure about the colour "scheme" any more, thinking I should have unified it a bit more.. Oh well, learning all the time.




Oh, and the hand is toooo big

EDIT: Leather on this update courtesy of conbagui's brilliant tutorial (haven't worked out how to link to it, sorry!)

Nice work Jynx_TQ.

Nice work. I like the material texture on his sleeves.

OK. First figure finished (or at least I think so - I'm bound to spend at least another hour on it before the end!)

Here he is on his own (I've changed the colour of the shield to try and get a more "unified" feel)


And here he is in context (this picture scares me due to the volume of work still to do )



Now to tackle the tree...Or "peeping Tom"

Wow, that is coming along great. I love how you did the smoke around his legs. That is really good.

Here's a suggestion...
You may be able to improve how the hair looks, by applying Color>Curves>Alpha. This can help to consolidate the outer edge of the gray.

For being the undead, it looks pretty good so far!

Depending on the atmosphere you are looking for, at the end when all is painted you can overlay a gradient or a color and play with transparency to make it look a little more "entwined".

Yep, ahead of you already (years of tarting up photos for flickr!). there's a yellow grey layer, with a difference cloud overlay over the one with the background. Each layer of "distance" in the final image will be separated with varying "mist" layers.

I shall give that a try, thanks

It's beginning to remind me of The Mire Of The Damned in one of my Might and Magic games.

Funny you should say that. When I first drew the main character here (20 odd years ago) I was DMing Warhammer FRP games, reading Dragonlance, Michael Moorcock, David Eddings, etc, etc.
Always loved the Fantasy genre.

Hit an unexpectedly busy time in my life recently so haven't had time to do much more to this project unfortunately.
Before the proverbial hit the fan I did start on the tree, using a texture created with various filters, bump mapping, layer masks and a custom image pipe brush.

This is still very much a WIP.

(I have made notes whilst creating this as I was making it up as I went along and didn't want to forget what I was doing - That does mean if, when I finally do finish it, anybody wants to know how I did it I should be able to share it fairly well)

Wow, that tree is looking great, I would sure like to know how you got it so real looking. Was it the pipe brush?

No, I created a texture using various filters in gimp and g'mic, then bump mapped a flat brown base image, then applied a gradient map (green+black i think?) to a duplicate layer, then colour to alpha, then layer mask....
It's not as complicated as I've made it sound but I don't have my notes on me. I will write them up properly as soon as I can.

The pipe brush was sampled from the trunk and I used it to draw in the smaller twigs so the colour stayed true.