This is my first attempt at a red sandking per the George R. R. Martin short story
"Sandkings". Thoughts on how I could make it better? It's 'constructed' from bits and pieces of random insect images found via Google Image Find. While I think it's faithful to the description in the story:
Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clicked visibly, while two long, fin antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. . . .
. . . Here the sandkings had bright red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim.
I'm not especially happy with it.

Craig

I have never seen one of these before but i think it is a great job. Colors and the whole painting. I don't understand why you got 73 views and not replys. This is one of the best on this site.

re: Not many comments so far
Not surprising. This is RetouchPRO, afterall, and most folks who view/post in this forum aren't as into arty-stuff like this as others.

Nonetheless from a technical perspective, this is pretty incredible "plastic surgery" (piecing it all together).

My .02:
* Perhaps find a more interesting background vs. all-the-same-texture
* The shadows need a little fine tuning, e.g., the one for the (as you look at the pic) right pincher doesn't have enough prongs (or whatever they are called) and the right-rear leg has the shadow on the wrong side compared to the others.
* Are the colors really this bright? If so, fine. If not, perhaps desaturate them a bit.

Pretty small stuff when you consider the overall excellent work.

~Danny~

I have never seen one of these before but i think it is a great job. Colors and the whole painting. I don't understand why you got 73 views and not replys. This is one of the best on this site.

You're way too kind :blush: (thanks though). But I'm my own worst critic -- the morning after I posted this I took another look and thought "what have I done?!" DannyRaphael had some interesting observations -- I guess what bugs (sorry) me the most about this is that it still looks too 'unreal'. Oh well -- it was something of an experiment. I may try it again sometime using some kind of 3D modeling software.

I can see that this is rather different than most of the kind of stuff that people on this forum are into -- although surely I'm not the only person to have experimented with dropping new visual elements into their pictures?

I'm not sure if this is against the rules to mention, but there are lots of websites that focus on Photo-Manipulation - which I submit this is an example of - as opposed to Photo-Retouching. I can supply you with several great ones if you want.

Don't know the physics (weight of insect / sand density etc..), but leaving some tracks behind in the sand may look a bit more convincing.

Other than that, very interesting work

byRo