Week 04 - Use of Basic Lighting

This week's iteration of the Medusa assignment was to focus on basic lighting. Two of my own designs were among those chosen last round, so I decided to take those and push them further. This assignment gave me an opportunity to learn a new workflow in Photoshop with more adjustment layers and blending modes than I'm used to, and I'm interested in exploring it more on my own time.

I didn't go too into the weeds on details for this, but the coloration for Medusa's snakes and lower body was based on the eastern diamondback rattlesnake—which is somewhat at odds with the effort I put into making sure ancient Greeks could have worn purple, but I chalked it up to Rule of Cool.

I was a little disappointed last time that I didn't have time to add some details to Perseus's bracer, so I took the opportunity to do that here. The mythology holds that Perseus is the son of Zeus, so I gave the bracer a sort of leather-worked eagle design.

I also updated my reference board, removing the old references I no longer needed and adding images of the diamondback rattlesnake and ancient Greek depictions of eagles.

 

And of course, proof of a submission to Perforce: