a drawing question...

[ratcreature]

Does anyone have tips or links to a tutorial or something that shows how to make things look not just wet but kind of slimy?

See, I'm attempting to draw some Temeraire fanart, namely the freshly hatched Iskierka. And I mostly have the dragon as a pencil drawing now, half out of its eggshell, though a bunch of spikes are still missing and I figure it ought to look a bit slimy still from hatching. Which somehow is harder to realize than I imagined.

This whole thing is turning out to be so much more trouble than its worth: first it took like a dozen or so thumbnail tries to get the posture not to suck completely, not to mention two attempts to make a small one work larger that failed, and I had to resort to a silly, foldable dragon wing model I made from bits of wire and paper, because I just couldn't visualize what you'd still see of the stupid wings (and they don't even show that much, though I guess that's part of the problem). Argh. </whining>

Comments

[einatlanta.livejournal.com]

crack an egg into a bowl and watch how the raw white behaves when you stick various stuffs into it. I guess what I'm saying is: observe the natural raw slime.

[ratcreature]

Heh, I guess I could do that, except that I don't have any eggs, nor do I eat them that often. I'd have to go out into the cold wet outside to buy eggs...

Another problem is that I guess in part I'm looking for a "graphical coding" for slime, so "drawing from nature" would only get me so far, since I don't draw realistically, but will ink after all. You know tricks you do, like you do crosshatching or a few squiggles done a certain way to stand for scales, lines to indicate reflections of water bodies, that kind of thing. I mean, I've looked at photos of hatched birds and stuff, slime molds even... and am still stumped.

[fic-kitty.livejournal.com]

IMO, "wet" reads as droplets and rivulets to me, whereas slime is more of a coating kind of thing; i.e, the surface would have indications of a dripping substance in sheets, as opposed to streams or individual drops, which is how I see water as behaving.

[ratcreature]

I considered maybe making it look a bit stringy, like more viscuous, with it stretching from the skin to some drop still on the eggshell fragments or something like that.

[fic-kitty.livejournal.com]

That sounds good too, especially with the eggshell fragments to help give the goo dimension.