It's Shiny (artwork)

[Gengel]

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~<Gengel>~

[Shian]

Oh wow! I love this one! (No, I'm not biased at all) :P

[awdz]

I adore the Istarian stamp on the exquisite orb! Is that how you know it's not a fake? ;-)

The swirls of fog as the sun comes over the mountains are excellent. I love the dragon's eye view of the craggy mountains. :-)

The impending confrontation between the dragons makes me think of why Dragon Nippe was outlawed by the dragon council - too much blood spilled by greed! I hope this battle is not deadly!

Another wonderful scene; thank you for sharing it! :-)

[Royal]

wow! impressive work m8! Its on my background :-)
GOOOO DRAGONS!

[Frith-Rae]

edit: there we go picture worked -

Woo - I wanna see the picture of what happens next!

[SentientSeeker]

Awesome; I love it!

Sent

[Gengel]

Thanks everyone for the wonderful feedback.

This was a continual effort in playing with environmental haze and volumetric clouds. I always wanted to do a sweeping horizon (pun intended ) with dragons.

I was gonna simply put a bunch (flock?) of dragons together but I felt that was too static for my liking.

I struggled to add 'motion' to the image till I saw my son's (Zaximus from yester-years) new StarCraft game. The loading screen's artwork gave me some ideas that were pretty simple. I rendered the dragons without a background and with an alpha layer (transparency with just the dragons). Duplicate layer, CS5 motion blur and merge detailed layer on top of blurred layer. Viola!

I have been wondering how to create an orb/wisp (Sorry Mother Istara - I do not want your tasks!). Basically, its a sphere with spots and a noise transparency to make them look less like spots

The swirly stars inside the wisp are that... gazillion sided stars. What I did differently with the stars was to add a purple glow. You will notice it on the spots as well as on the underside of the dragon. The purple glow was a hint I picked up by looking at Radiant Wisps. I liked the subtle complexity it added to the exquisite orb. And finally the corny logo I can't imaging how mithril runes would stick to an orb, but I thought the dragon glyph would be very appropriate for a shiny.

Thanks for looking!

~< Gengel >~