Painting Lava

In this lesson we had to put lava into the cracks of this rock monster. I used a lava texture as well as inner and outer glow effects to get the lava to look more realistic. I also used a inner shadow to make the lava really look like its inside the crakes. The hardiest part of this was doing the background. I'm not so good at composition and I haven't done a lot of backgrounds before. I used refrances and overlayed them with basic colours to block out some of the rocks. I also looked at tutorials so I could make my own rocks for the foreground. They took up most of my time as I keep starting again. I also tried using the colours from the rock monster when painting the rocks, so that they look like they're from the same environment. Once done I added a fog effects to separate the monster from the background, as he started to disrepair a little. 

We then designed our own lava rock creatures. At first I wanted to do something human like, but as I do that a lot, I decided to make something more animalistic, as I don't draw animals a lot.

Out of my fist sketches I liked the aquatic idea the best as I liked the idea of something swimming in lava. I spent a lot of time trying to get the rocks to look like rocks, which I think I did pretty well. But again, my composition I think wasn't that good. I was going to put in a lava background, but because of the position I draw him in, nothing really worked.  I also think I should have put his tail behind him so the focus would be more on his face.