PAST

October 27, 2004

NEXT

I started working on this image quite some time ago, but it was looking so bad that I gave up. But I recently picked it back up and put a little more time into it and came up with this. With Halloween on its way, I felt it was pretty appropriate.

How I did it:
The background is just a simple clearing in the woods in Virginia. The T-Rex started out as a bronze statue that I took a picture of. The statue was actually sitting in the lobby of the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. The image actually didn't look very realistic at all. The statue was all bronze so it was a deep, dark brown color, and the lighting from the flash made it almost impossible to work with. I paste it over the background and couldn't seem to get it to look very good at all. So I had left it alone for a few years. Just browsing through my archives I came across it again and decided to try a few things. I adjusted the brightness and contrast of the T-Rex and did a major blending of shading. I tediously outlined the cracks and defined all the curves and lines throughout the creature, touching up on the existing texture. I brushed the teeth to a bright white as I also did the talons on the forearms. I blackened the right eye, but found there to be a strange problem with the left one. It certainly didn't match the right eye. But upon further investigation into the original image and research on the statue itself, I found out that the left side of the face doesn't really match the right side all that well, and that the eyes were not actually where I thought they should have been. The actual eyes were set much lower on the face, making the creature look even more fake. Where I had placed the eye actually makes the creature look much more sinister and dangerous. I will just have to do some more work on the other side to match. Or maybe just presume that the beast had been involved in a terrible fight.
I then took and lightly began to brush the surface of the creature with a nice green color. I figured that this creature may have had the ability to change colors and be able to blend in with the background. I then added the shading on the ground. I printed out a copy and it looked great. I was pretty proud of my results on this one.