[WIP] Serpent of sorts...

[iamdish]

I am a beginner, so bare with me. I can't seem to figure out how to create detail, everything always turns out very boring and solid. I don't know how to shade properly either I suppose.



I want the whole body to be as if it had scales, but I can't find any tutorials that would help. ahhh The spiral thing on its head is a horn by the way 

[Varish]

For scale try little splotches of colour.

I try to make it look less boring.
I am also beginner so take with grain of salt.

[adcrusher524]

hey,
    I'm kinda of a noob also, but i thought i would try to help you out. I couldn't quite get the scaley texture, I mostly did an edit on the shading. The horn/spiral thing on it's head is completely gray. try not to have complete gray colors because it looks boring. I tinted the horn to more red, instead of complete gray. When you shade dark, change the hue to a colder color such as blue or purple. If you are adding highlight, then shift the hue to a warm color such as yellow or orange. Doing that will give it a more realistic affect. You need to give the picture some highlights and a little more shadows. The wing on the side of the snake kind of looks like a hand with 3 fingers. I changed the ends to make them more pointy to make them look more like wings. Also, the head is quite circular, and I think it should be more triangular to give it a meaner look. ( I'm just a noob, so i may be wrong on some of that)

Here is my edit:

[Tobe]

hmmm... from the style and theme (cute monster) you're going for, I think it's better for you to reference to pokemon sprites
http://sdb.drshnaps.com/sheets/Nintendo/Misc/Pokemon/FireRedPokemon.png

pokemon sprite are not too hard to reference to, and great learning example : )

[Derek_Reaves]

Hey adcrusher. Great job explaining to him about hues. I was also working on a similar edit to show him the hue shifts, but didn't think about changing the grey. Your color change there looks much better.

I do have to say your advice was nice, but your posted example needs a bit of work. The serpent still looks flat and boring. The only part that doesn't really look flat is close to the end of the tail where you shaded dark where the serpent folds back. You pulled this off pretty well, but you didn't do it anywhere else on the serpent. If you did this for the folds that appear before that one, i think it would look much better.

[Avocado]

Man, everybody wants to get their hands on your serpent.  Gotta hand it to you, he's got some really interesting stuff going on.
Prepare for the least cohesive post ever written.

I didn't really want to post this because it seems really off to me but I don't want it to go to complete waste, so here's my edit (I have some banding issues going on and the shading isnt very clean but this was giving me lots of trouble):


To be honest I feel like my insecurities with this stem from not knowing where you want it to go.  It's a serpent of sorts but it has wings, so I don't know if you were going for dragon or not.  I didn't include wings because yours only had one and I didn't really know what was going on with it, and this felt more snakey to me.  Scale-wise, a lot of textures really depend on your use of color or shading, so that sort of ties into your thing with shading. I feel like you can get it to read as a serpent without scales, but I couldn't really get scales to work without it seeming messy.  You can make your work less flat by using darker darks and lighter lights, but I feel like color choice and lightness were already covered by someone else.

My big issue with your original drawing was that I didn't know what the pose was. Is the serpent leaping out of a coil? Is it just leering at its prey?  I just changed the pose to a half turn with dramatic lighting(man, my lighting is really horrible here).

My post is becoming as jumbled as my drawing process was with this, ill just try to cap things up: Pose? Function? Lighting!