More fishy fluff

Just trying to churn out some quick variations on the fishman idea at the moment. Here's a couple of the better ones... Hopefully I'll actually be bothered to explain my ideas in some detail on here soon...

Texture Fluff

Seeing as I've slipped from keeping this up to date with what I'm doing, I thought I'd post something I've been trying out which I think has been successful...
I've been playing around with textures in my character concepts, not only as a method of enhancing the aesthetic of the design, but also as a tool to speed up the design process. I have tried it out on a couple of quick concepts for a sea creature, in order to quickly get a transluscent and mottled effect on the skin without spending ages trying to achieve this with layer upon layer of low-opacity paint. Considering these are just some quick rough concepts, I think it really helped to add some depth quickly and easily, and gave me more of an idea of what direction the look of this character should be heading.

Cityscape

This is a section of a city that I created just for experimenting with using images from maya models in photoshop for the purposes of achieving more accurate perspective and realisitic lighting in my paintings and landscape designs.

Damn you Maya

I've been practicing with Maya a little more, and I managed to put together a half decent sci-fi cityscape, which I planned on using in photoshop to paint over, to get some nice shadows and realistic perspective etc... However I decided it would be clever to play around with the lighting, and now every time I come to render my work, it comes up totally black. I've tried resetting to default lighting, but it just ain't having it. Anyway, in the mean time I attempted to further my techniques in photoshop by trying out a little portrait work. I've never done this before, and it has showed me that using reference material is incredibly valuable when it comes to getting realistic lighting and shadow effects.