Creatures Caves

The ice drips in the pond are my favorite part of the entire room. I love how they turned out. I honestly did not expect them to turn out that well. I thought I would have to redo them & experiment a number of times before I got them to turn out nicely. I was really really surprised when they turned out so beautifully on the first try.

No, I haven't made a news post about the background. Since it was part of someone else's project, it never really occurred to me to do so. If you want to do so, I certainly don't mind.

The ice drips were something that I painted by hand in the program I was using to put the background together. (I used a wacom tablet & an art program that allows layers, like Photoshop or Corel Painter.)

1. I started out with a very pale, almost white blue & drew in the basic shape of the ice drips & filled them in.

2. Then I used a pale I think it's called cyan blue to paint a few lines of color on the side of the ice drips that was furthest away from the light source so that it looked like the light was shining through the ice. I tried to make the lines of color follow the curve that I wanted the ice to make.

3. Once I had the cyan color in place, I used a pale shadowy blue to color the sides of the ice drips that were closer to the light source. This helped to create the shadows & show which ice drips were behind the others.
Note : The only solid patch of color I used was the base off-white color. Everything else was only thin lines of color to give the ice drips a bit of texture to them, to make them something other than smooth mounds. Also I might have had the brush set to slightly transparent. The overlapping translucent brush strokes create a nice play of color that adds to the look of the ice.

4. Using the dodge tool, I played around & added highlights to various parts of the ice drips. I didn't really plan where to add them, I just added them where I felt that they would look good.

5. Then, using the burn tool, I added a little bit of extra shading to the areas in shadow. (This step might have switched places with #4. It's one of the details that I don't remember exactly.)

6. After I was done playing with the burn & dodge tools, I used the smudge tool to start blurring everything together. Following the curve I wanted the ice to make, I just kept smudging & blurring the colors together until it felt right.
Note: You can pause step 6 to repeat any of the previous steps when things start blurring together too much or to intensify the colors a bit.

7. Once the blurring & smudging is done, cleaning up the edges of the ice drips is the next step. Only remove the excessive blurring around the edges, a little bit of blurring is fine. A little bit of blur around the edges of the ice drips can make it look like the water there is just starting to freeze & add more to the ice drips.

8. Duplicate the layer the ice drips is on & play around with the layer effect options. Some of the layer effects can enhance the colors & the intensity of the colors to give the ice drips that final touch & really make them look like ice. Sometimes the effect is too strong, so you have to make the layer slightly transparent to tone the effect down to keep it from being over done.
Note: Steps 7 & 8 might also have been switched around.

That's pretty much how I made the ice drips Malkin.