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It's a photoshop digital painting

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Originally Posted by _bluestOCT

OP, can I ask about your process? Like what tablet you used, how long it took, and how you approached completing the illustration? It's something I've been wanting to get into.

It's going to sound ridiculous, but, like almost all of my digital art, I used a mouse for this, not a tablet. Here's the step-by step process:

1. I made sketches of each dinosaur in Photoshop without any background (a mistake I won't make again) and fully rendered them in grayscale. each dino is on it's own layer. Made sure the dinos I chose to be in the picture were all from the same time period and region (For example, you can't pit an Allosaurus against a Postosuchus, that's just foolishness). I rendered scales with a combination of the basic paintbrush tool and the basic scales texture brush.

2. I thought of a background that would fit the lighting angle and contrast on the grayscale paintings.

3. Did research into paleontology regarding the flora and landscapes at the time. Had a difficult time finding anything about the landscapes of prehistoric Alberta outside of forests (which couldn't have made up the entire region) so I just stole a kind of wetlands background idea you'd see in a todd marshall drawing because it looks cool and hoped it made sense.

4. I painted the background in color, including the sky. Realized that I really, really liked the clouds in this one jpeg I used as a reference so I just used that and altered it a bit with the paintbrush tool instead of using my own sky painting.

5. I figured out a color pattern for the dinos and colorized them by going to: adjustments > color balance, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation

It took about 12 hours on and off over the weekend(I work slow)

That's basically it.

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Okay guys, this is the last one. I'm planning on pursuing a serious career in illustration.

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Originally Posted by _bluestOCT

OP, can I ask about your process? Like what tablet you used, how long it took, and how you approached completing the illustration? It's something I've been wanting to get into.

BTW, the mouse is most definitely not ideal for digital art. You probably already were thinking that, lol. I use it because I'm just way too accustomed to it (cushy office jobs plus lots of free time in my early 20's). A tablet PC with a stylus, like a Toshiba Portage, is the best route. They are kind of hard to find these days though I think. Standard tablets take a lot of getting used to and they feel weird at first. Almost like a meager improvement over a mouse, which they kind of are. It might be better to use an ipad + a stylus + an artstudio app. I haven't used it myself, but this is the kind of work people are making on it:

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Originally Posted by BroekHosen

Still no Ja Rule

Consider him the rightmost styracosaurus. After all, in terms of pop-culture impact he's basically a dinosaur. *ba-dum-tss*

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Originally Posted by _bluestOCT

I really appreciate all of the feedback! And yeah, pretty surprised that you did all of that with your mouse, I'd never have the patience for that since my mouse is very faulty. I've had a Wacom Bamboo pen & touch tablet for almost a year now and haven't done anything significant with it, just testing it out and using it as a replacement mouse sometimes. Never really knew how to approach starting a project because I had no idea what to make. Will probably just practice with references and go from there. Good luck with the serious art bizz, would love to see future projects of yours.

Thanks. What do you draw?