Slowly getting back in the groove of things

[daio]

A combination of Holiday busy-ness and SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) usually causes me to be MIA and pretty much unproductive in late November, December and January. So it is always a relief when I perk up start being productive again. Interestingly enough I do some of my best work as I am coming out of the dumps in January/February. This year

Comments

[kosaginolegion]

Lovely, Donna.

What did you do to get the painting feel?

[daio]

It's a combination of the textures, lighting and postwork. The background is RDNA's Infinity Cove with a modified texture from the Golden Morning texture set. The unicorn has a highly modified version of the Red Roan texture from the MilHorse Bundle. The morphs are a combination of mine and Lyne's. Pose is mine inspired by a horse statue I saw. The lighting set up was set-up to mimic the lighting of the background. After rendering, details of the unicorn and its mane were painted in. Then additional postwork, filters and color and contrast correction was done. Lasty the white water around the legs was painted in and additional highlights in the water and on the unicorn were painted. Start to finish it took about 12 hours (including rendering time). One of the postwork tricks I used was to duplicate the image layer, desaturate, increase the brightness and contrast, apply the "find edges" filter and set that layer to soft light and about 30% opacity. That helps give it the painterly look.

[kosaginolegion]

I'm going to have to play with some of that. I use Paintshop but it should be able to handle the stuff you mention.

Thanks!

[controuble]

When I first looked at it at work, the first thing that popped into my head was "sinister" - that's not Daio's usual style. But when I got home, it's not as dark and forbidding, just lovely unicorn caught in a stray sunbeam on a cloudy day. Very nice.

[daio]

Everything always looks darker on my PC than on my Mac and since I do all the art on my Mac sometimes they end up looking dark on PCs. Ths piece has a very sudued pallet and that makes it look even darker. But sinister? That's a new one. ;)

[controuble]

Maybe that was a poor word choice. It gave me the feeling the unicorn was in danger. Not a PC per-se at work. I have a laptop that docks to a great big SUN monitor. It looks fine on my desktop PC's monitor at home. I haven't tried looking at it directly on the laptop's screen.

[daio]

It's probaly more of a monitor difference thing than a PC versus Mac thing admittedly but most of the PC monitors seem to be darker for some reason.

[ms_dblk]

The water looks angry - but it frequently does when it's overcast. Is this likely to be a candidate for next year's calendar?

[daio]

Yes, I suspect this will be in next year's unicorn calendar.