very cool!

Wow, I actually.. can't imagine how you got that look O:

Wow, that's a very unworldly, but brillant use of coloring with the otter to make him look alien. It looks like he's trying to play-wrestle with that golem cat. I admit the rich use of color elsewhere, with the deep blue night sky, the eerie green glow from the grave, the shadows and the incrinate details scupted out in the walls and such of that crypt.

I've only just noticed this has been posted here.

I was delighted: I'd asked a few other artists to have a go at the description below, and Richard was the only one to get the rainbow gleams looking metallic, and interacting nicely with the underlying musculature.

"Well, this is an excessively gaudy creature. His size would make him fairly remarkable, but what really assaults your optic nerves is the strident CD-like iridescence of his pelt: Rainbows toboggan with reckless abandon along his form, tumbling at tighter curves to splash vibrant fleeting colours over nominally silver fur. The ferocious bristle of whiskers around his muzzle glitter predictably, but you might not previously have noticed those few above his eyes and at the back of his elbows.
"Otherwise a typically sleek and happy zoomorphic otter - broad muzzle, small round ears, and flat head; long streamlined body, low slung haunches, short legs, and a fairly long tail that tapers to a blunt tip.
"Be reassured: it was only AOL CDs he ate.


Thanks, Richard!

Also, I never asked how you managed to work out how and where to place the rainbows - did you sit around bending CDs? Did you imagine there was a multicolored flourescent tube shining on the otter? Are you a towering mathematical genius, and calculated it in your head?

I'd love to know, but whichever way, I was completely delighted by the effect.

Basically, I looked at CDs, and studied what they do to light. I painted the figure just like I would any shiny object, except the highlights as smeared out, and broken down into it s component colours. Also, the colours that are made that way are distinguished by their intensity, and their purity, and if you don't capture that effect, it just ends up looking like you threw paint over everything. Fortunately, when you're making art for the screen, you do have at your disposal colours that are more intense than anything you can duplicate with pigment. I used those ear-searing out of gamut shades that you're normally nor supposed to use, and set them against a dark grey body to make them pop that much more.

I hope this makes it clearer.

It does. Brilliant, thanks. :)