Skeletal Metamorphosis- profile view

A quick visual guide to a profile view of my metamorphosis. I havnt gone into too much detail as the next stages are more vital than showing the detail at this stage. Also, I only drew half of the skeleton, not the full one so there is less 3d effect, but this is not needed at this stage.

Reference imagery:

http://a-s.clayton.edu/biology/biol3650l/skeletal/amphibian/frog_articulated_lateral_large.jpg

an x-ray of my skull:

The painting Process:

 I started off using a new layer on top of my birds eye view of the metamorphosis.

This gave me more accuracy with proportion and shape.

I then took the bottom layer away so I could see what outline I was left with to enhance. 

 In my opinion the skeleton looked too frog like so I changed the skull to look half human half frog but not straight down the middle, I mixed sections up a bit, for example the top of the head being human, but with frog eye sockets and frog nasal cavity and the bottom section being frog skull with human teeth.

My skeleton incorporates many aspects of each human and frog. For example, frogs don't have necks so they can't turn there heads, hence why they have such large round eyes with the view to see around them, with my metamorphosis there is both a neck and large round eyes. Also, frogs have a sliding pelvis which compensates for them when jumping, giving extra 'spring' but humans do not, so this skeleton has both human hips and frog pelvis. Further in the fleshing stages of my design more detail on the enhancements of splicing human with Dendrobates Azureus will be uncovered. 

Skeletal Metamorphosis

I now have a starting point for my Metamorphosis.

This is a digital painting explaining which parts of the skeleton I used from each side to achieve my base design. With this I can flesh it out and get an in-depth feel for my character to incorporate into the final outcome.

I have posted the process of how I got to this point below....

Image reference:

http://www.infovisual.info/02/img_en/028%20Skeleton%20of%20a%20frog.jpg

Image reference:

Feher, Gyorgy, Anatomy drawing school : human, animal, comparative anatomy, Konemann, 2006

Image reference:

http://www.infovisual.info/02/img_en/028%20Skeleton%20of%20a%20frog.jpg

The stages of my digital painting:

 Rough sketch to start with

To make the process quicker and easier, I selected half of the skeleton, duplicated it, flipped it horizontally and pasted the two layers together.

After the frog painting, I started on the Human skeleton, manipulating the position for a more accurate metamorphosis.

After finishing the Human skeleton, I viewed the two layers together to get perspective of how I could select parts to merge together.

 I then reduced the opacity on both of these layers to 50% and added a fresh later.

 On this fresh layer I started to sketch out selected parts of each skeleton to make one creature, using the less visible layers below as a guide.

Now and then I removed the under layers to see how my new skeleton was looking.

I saved images of the layers in a different order, again for different perspectives.
This one has the human on top, metamorphosis in the middle and the frog as the bottom layer.

This one has the frog, the human then the metamorphosis being the bottom layer.

Again for ease I detailed half of the image and duplicated it to get a mirrored half.

 I added tones and this was a good enough image for the purpose I need it.

 Here I put all of the opacity of each layer to 100% to see what they would all look like together.

And finally I annotated the three images showing arrows from one side or the other to show the sections of each skeleton and how they contributed to the metamorphosis.

Maya- Starting to grasp it now

The task to start with

Then I had a play around with it, trying to get more of a feel for the process