Dragon Scales Tutorial

I've developed a pretty simple way to generate a dragon skin texture in Photoshop. It has a bit of a three dimensional look to the scales where each individual scale is given a subtle highlight and shadow to make them seem like there's a real surface there. And the best part is that you don't have to draw or paint a single thing by hand! This entire texture is generated using the built-in tools and filters in Photoshop:



Pretty cool, huh? It took me a while to figure out how to do this, but the technique is relatively simple. I wrote up a tutorial to share the technique:

Click here to begin the tutorial.

Have fun with this and I hope to see some artwork that uses it! Anyone is free to use this technique, and if you do, I'd appreciate it if you could provide a link back to the tutorial so others can see how you did it. :)

Let me know what you think.

Cool! Now if only I could do it... I'm gonna get it asap.

Cool, thanks Furox.
This will help me out big time when i get back to doing other dragons/dinos.

Just to show, i have done a quick render (1280x1024) of Booster Beau with a scale bump texture, so keeping his black and gold marking but also with a scaley look.

Thanks.

**Clicky for pic**

that's so uber draccy super special awsome brillant!

That scaly look does look cool. :)

Now when the characters so "Oh Scales!" we know they'll really mean it! :D

It is cool, Furox.