3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

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3 ESSENTIAL
TIPS FOR
DIGITAL
PAINTING OF
A FANTASY
SCENE, WITH
DONGJUN LU
Dongjun Lu is a full time concept artist
working in the film and video game
industries on titles that include King of
Avalon, Toukiden, Nobunaga's Ambition 14,
Romance of Three Kingdoms, and Assign
Dragon to name a few. He also as 5 years of
teaching experience and has taken the time
to share a few of his essential tips for digital
painting with us, using his work Knights with
Dragon, as an example. See what Dongjun
had to say, and be sure to visit his design
website to see more works and tutorials.
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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

website to see more works and tutorials.

This is one of my personal works which was

done during the days I was painting some
dragons for a client. This is also the one of
study works for understanding of dragons
and knights. In the Initial stages, I was
thinking of creating a female knight with a
giant dragon behind of her. But when I went
to composition part I found she was a bit
lonely, so I tried to create more male knights
around the dragon.

The concept design part of the dragon made

me very tangled. The first difficulty is the
pose of the dragon. I have to study the inside
anatomy and muscle structure of the dragon
with the pose. And also I have to think about
how she can make good composition with
the female knight. Neverthless, I tried to turn
the dragon body opposite direction with the
head, but it was still not working. The
second difficulty was how to make the
details of the dragon such as scales, horns
and dragon reins. I searched many reference
images of lizard, bone and horse reins. They
gave me initial inspirations of details for
dragon.

TIPS ON PROCESS:

1. Composition and Perspective

The first step is a quick sketching of the big

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

The first step is a quick sketching of the big

composition. In this stage, you don’t have to
think too much of the details. We should put
more attention on the big relationship of
compositions. In this sketch, I purposely
placed a rim lighting on the face of the
female knight and strong lighting on her
weapon. The main reason is that I want to
bring the first focal points to those area.

2. Exploring Design and Colors

After deciding the lighting, we should put our

more energy on the designs and colors. The
design part here took me a lot of time. I
searched a lot of references to get
inspiration. You can use some textures to
apply to your sketch and to help. The main
color map here is dark purple combined with
bright orange. I chose these colors using
sunset reference images, or just by going
outside to study them. Even the rock on the
ground is also combined with those colors to
bring out contrast.

3. Adjustment and Rendering

I did a big change of the composition here.

Such as the pose of the dragon and the size

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

Such as the pose of the dragon and the size

of the knights and designs. I believe that
there should more negative space like sky
and far away buildings to create a spacious
feeling and perspective. In this stage, we
also need think a bit more about the
focusing areas. The female knight and
dragon head should be rendered to high
details. Following are the dragon hand and
other knight. The best way of making details
is that paint the forms and add designs as
much as you can. After that apply textures to
render out highly detail.

ANNOTATIONS:

1. Armor

This is how I paint details of female knight

armor which belong to one character, We
should pay attention on controlling the
density. For the left hand on the shadow
side of shield, for instance, I left a sketched
feeling.

2. Dragon Head

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

There are many details on her eye and

mouth area so that we still can feel the
density fluidity on the dragon’s face.

3. Rocks

I used some textures for some certain area

of the rock. I reduced the details on the
shadow side and leaved brush feeling there.
Too much textures showing here will makes
the overall composition too tight.

We want to thank Dongjun for these quick,

valuable tips!

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MOVIES IN 2016

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

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3 Essential Tips for Digital Painting of a Fantasy Scene, with Dongjun Lu - article | CGSociety 1/7/17, 12'21 AM

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Gold8 Ball
1d

Amazing work. Everytime I try and draw

a dragon it ends up looking too cartoony.
Reply · Share · 1 Like ·

Purple Tree
30 Dec

Good
Reply · Share · 4 Likes ·

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