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MartinBlur — One last encounter for us
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#baby #babydragon #clouds #dragon #feral #girlfriend #sand #sunshine #wild #wings #beach #bokeh #flares #hatchling #helmet #horns #life #moon #nature #plateau #prothesis #reflections #tail #tongue #toothless #water #treesforest #nightfury
Published: 2016-07-06 02:25:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 4348; Favourites: 185; Downloads: 28
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Description
A warm welcome, a bit of cuddling around and a lot of play later..."[...] What's that thing on your tail? (She asked)
-Oh, that thing, is "the message".
-A message?
-Yes, is a message from the warrior of the feral philosophy, my best friend. It says TRUTH and UNION all over it. The fact is, I didn't deserve to come back with you in the first place. It's a gift that I can't keep.
-[...]
-I can't stay much longer...
Sorry."
His year old offspring watches him with strong concern about what he is trying to explain. They don't understand it, and they may never will.
========================
Meanwhile all the dragons went for their eggs, and after Toothless finds the helmet in a handful of hours, he uses one last breath of feral freedom to sprint few THOUSAND kilometers deep to the south. Because he knows where they could be hiding, and there might not be a next time.
He knows well who's holding the weight of a whole generational gap and he can't allow anything to avoid all living beings to reach peace ultimately.
No, his family is not safer with him. But he can save his family and many others, whatever the race.
====TECHNICAL DATA====
I built my own idea of where toothless could have been when he escaped at "The Gift of the Night fury" a long time ago, but just recently started truly materializing it.
It was originally sketched on 2014. Environment shapes and basic palette was made on 2015. Full painting and shading, details and effects were done in the last 3 weeks (last 80% of progress went here).
I don't remember having used any reference aside the helmet, but I remember the environment was originally inspired from Far Cry 3. In fact I was going to put palm trees here. But I gave up due to complexity. The moon is pasted from photo I took, "screen" layer. Experimenting with a zigzag shading to give a bit more texture.
Over 150+ hours went lonely into this. 20 layers of 5148x2160 pixels (CINEMATIC 4K/UHD) @ 16 bit-float per-channel. I really wanted to make this look like an actual movie frame.
It was insane the effort I have put into this, so the reception this piece alone receives might affect how much I'm gonna spend doing this stuff. Thanks for the visit.
Related content
Comments: 35
Oh! How nice to see that there was what to back for! Absolutely adorable scene. Night Furies family. Great art - it's a great pleasure to be able to watch your artworks again!
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I totally hate the way they designed those dragons, but this still came out nice.
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Indeed, I can't deny you. Casually, I'm finding a way of making them less "froggy" as well as less "squared" which will eventually lead to my own style and design of dragons. Scraps could be uploaded in the future if, ONLY IF it goes as planned.
Nothing sure but whatever, any feedback is apreciated!
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Coming from Project Comment!
I think that this piece is absolutely gorgeous! I may not watch the television series of How To Train Your Dragon despite having already seen the movies, but this did stand out for me when I saw it in the admin forum.
The colors are very vibrant indeed and strike a strong resemblance of the movie just by the way the family appears. Not only that, but the shading and lighting are spectacular; you can clearly see Toothless' and the family's shadows and the colors blend very evenly.
However, two things stood out to me right as I looked at it. The waves in the bottom-right corner do not really appear to be waves at all; it's difficult to make out the typical crescent/wave shape. And, the waves looked awfully blurry in that area; everywhere else was fine. I think your form on waves is already proficient, but it might be helpful to consider the blurriness next time.
And, the other thing that stood out were the cliffs. They seemed to be just a little too bright for an object at that distance, and they might need just a little more contrast to add to the detail.
Overall, I think you did a fantastic job with this piece! Just make sure to consider the brightness and sharpness of the environment when you do your next piece. 
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Oh... There are almost no waves here. Those were ideally cloud reflections (I have to practice on that asap). I had very little experience with water, so is still 10 times better than my previous attempt.
I do think as well that the cliff might be too bright.
Don't feel bad, next time I should put in description "please be severe" or something xP. Thanks for the feedback.
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Hi there, I'm not really familiar with the How To Drain Your Dragon franchise (I watched only the first movie), but I will try to give a nice critique on this picture of yours. First of all, I like the composition of the landscape. You have a nice sandy beach and some cliffs on the right in bright warm colors on the left hand side of the picture and the sea in cool blue-green colors on the right hand side; the contrast of these two halves is good! Then we have the dragon family in the foreground. The characters look very alive, you managed to have a good distribution of lights and shadow. I also like the reflection of the little dragon in the water. All I have to say is that you might put a little more details on the dragons (e.g. emphasis on scales or such), to make the foreground even more outstanding.
Very neat work, keep it up! This comment was brought to you by ProjectComment
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Hi, No real need to judge the story at all, but fyi is was to fit inside the short movie "The Gift of the Night fury" that goes between HTTYD 1 and 2.
Really thanking you for commenting. I'll check this up for the future.
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Hi, from ,
I really like the mountains and the detailing of the rocks behind Toothless, and I just love love love the waves that are crashing on the shore. I think you could do better with the close-up waves seeing what you can do with the waves near the shore, though. The closer-up waves in the right lower hand corner is so blurry, I can barely make out the sparkles from the sun. The sand can also use more details on the left bottom corner, it seems like it was just painted one shade and left there. I highly enjoy the shading of the toothless family in the front, they are very cute and the lighting on them is very nice. I do think that you can blend the shadows more (the shadows from the toothless family,) so that it balances out with the sand. All in all, very nice painting, very detailed, and I really enjoy the environment, which I know can be hard to do. 
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Hi! Yea, better than expected as first try on a large rocky environment.
Oh, I didn't notice that, I should have re-touched out the waves that I had to blur out to recover some depth to the image as they were too small and looked flat.
Ummm... The very right corner has nothing but sun sparkles and cloud reflections (It's okay, misinterpretations can only be the artist fault)... but now I also see I could have added actual waves to it but I'd have to redo reflections and stuff. Actually very helpful, thanks for the review
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Hi, I came across this piece in !
I'm not into the HTTYD fandom so my comment will ignore the background story of the scene because I have not seen the movie so I might be inaccurate. I like the look of the characters, they are adorable, especially the little dragons. The whole piece has a nice touch to it and the scene is peaceful and full of positive emotions. There are a lot of details and it looks like you did your best to draw this. My suggestion is, because it took you so long to complete the whole work that you try out cell shading style that is more likely to fit your skill level. This painterly style is for advanced users, and I think it took you so long because you have not practiced enough. Cell shading or block shading is easier because there is no blending and there are no gradients. The result may not look this good but you will gain enough experience in digital art if you block-shade first.
Another thing is that the sky in the top right corner is pretty much burnt out and it cannot be fixed because if you over-exposition in a digital program, either a painting or a photo there is a data loss to the picture and it can't be darkened again. But it's not a big thing, just a small remark. I hope it was helpful, keep up the good work!
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Hi, and thank you for the comment! I am actively seeing cell shading as a candidate for new pieces but well... I have like... the worst shaky hands, so even clean lineart is already very time consuming. But I will practice more now!
If you check the description you might notice this was from a floating point image, which works with linear gamma and allows HDR painting, and it can store up to 1024 times beyond the saturation "1.00" point. I can easily recover (technically "unhide") detail by dialing exposure down, but here I am studying the limitations of common low dynamic range cameras (about 7-10 f/stops). Trying to take pictures with noticeable backlightning and compensating exposure for very dark objects, at some point overexposure is to be expected, even with DSLR.
However, you're right I overdid it, so I'll try more subtle stuff, thanks for the suggestion.
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You are welcome! :9 I understand the shaky hand problem, I have also problems with clean digital lineart but that's because of the small tablet that I still have not yet mastered. However doing linework quickly will reduce this problem because then your hand will not have time to shake. (And try not to think about it much when doing the lineart, thinking messes it up, it's just how the brain works.)
Well, I am not that professional in camera use so I don't know the technical details about HDR painting (I am a beginner in digital art in general).
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Wow, this is a really beautiful piece. There's a lot of detail going on, and the main family looks great. Everything is colored very nicely, too.
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#Awesome
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OH MY GOSH! I'm just dying for season 4 to come already. I want to see hiccup make the alliance with the defenders of the wing so bad!
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Came from !
Oh my goodness, this is an absolute stunning piece! The water is colored nicely, the background is soft, and I absolutely love how you even added the moon! Many people forget to add that small detail. I like the cliffs in the backgrounds and how detailed they are! Same goes to the the trees! The lighting is great, and so is the shading! The only problem I have with this is the clouds on the right has too much dark shading. Still wonderful art anyways!
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Highly appreciated, thanks for the feedback! The background ended up slightly better than expected given the lack of systematic procedures. I had the fear that it were going to look much closer and smaller (with the feeling of plain grass) but it seems to work fine. Glad someone noticed the moon, which I believe is a resource to be used subtly and very sparingly, especially on daily scenarios.
Yea, something was odd about clouds on that side, I couldn't figure it out.
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The water and detail in the background is just amazing! ♥ Absolutely fantastic work, I'm in love with the expression and sweet idea behind this! Very good job with it, I love all of this!
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Excellent work man.
I love the lighting and overall feel of this scene.
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Thanks m8. I feel good to say is the first work on which I have applied no postprocessing at all. I'm finally getting it right on-the-go.
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Well, the result is stunning! I wish to see more of this sooner or later.
I've read the comments a little, the time you spend on this is indeed important, but in my opinion if you can, you should submit sketches and content related to your "huge projects" from time to time, people think you left the website otherwise, sadly.
Anyway, seeing a piece such as this one ^ in our feed/dev messages is really nice, because it is kind of rare to get to see such quality.
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Seriously, Thank you! You have a valid point. But I am getting frustratingly overwhelmed by the amount of things that I like and I'm good at, and I have to make sacrifices, and make a choice or I'll stay master of none. But they are all carried down by my weak points: I still suck at programming and I can't even schedule my routine. No programming, no python, no animation, no projects, no dreams.
If this were the game of life, I've failed the tutorial.
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GEEZ! DAMN, SPEECHLESS D: 150 hours!? Holy crap! Duude this is very stunning though, wow! O:
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Thanks bud! I got a few bugs and crashes due to the resolution, Krita is not that stable yet.
Funny thing, I learned more from CGI tutorials and photography than painting tutorials. I took me a lot more than it deserved tho. Now I'm focused on speedpainting, and non-fan art, but due to poor reception I can't ensure you'll see more uploads from me.
Worst case, this might be kind of an actual goodbye artwork. I'll keep painting of course, but unless I get a hell lot faster, I'm done here.
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Aw xc Why not just try uploading quick sketches or simpler paintings? You can't really expect to be fast with so many details ;v;
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Well, I am still that shy. But don't you worry about it, there are reasons why I didn't update the journal yet. I am speeding stuff up and I might give myself a chance, depending on my progress at the techniques of recovery and implementation from imagination [...] or whatever :v
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It's so beautiful!
You can almost feel the wind and the sea, great job!
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Thanks for the compliment m8 , it is so... refreshing
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