Another page spread for the Ring Saga project. Here the dwarf smith Alberich spies on the three Rhinemaidens as he summons up the courage to approach them. Again, for the style of this opening underwater sequence I've used a painted watercolor approach, with a lot of overlays and brushwork done post-render. Two caustic gels were used along with five other lights to create a very diffuse and slightly distorted look for the scene. An extensive week-long multi-pass render session resulted in over 60 separate render layers which were all then composited in Photoshop along with a number of painted backdrops and overlays to create the final plate. On top of this two columns of text were later added for the completed two-page book spread. For the dwarf figure I began with Michael 3 (believe it or not) and morphed the crap out of it until I had something resembling a hunchback midget, with distorted proportions and a fairly grotesque face. Then I grew dynamic hair all over him and custom painted a whole bunch of dirt and grunge and blemishes onto a skin texture taken from "The Elderlies" by Dalinise. He also has really rotten teeth, but you can't see that here (more on that later!) It resulted in a really unique character, but has made it utter hell to get his clothes to fit. I grunged up his clothes quite a bit as well, to make it really appear that he's been working down there in the mines awhile. The three Rhinemaiden figures are all Stephanie 3 with morphs from Thorne's "Vivien" character for Laura. I wanted a real sleek and slender model for the fishlike sirens, and Steph4 wasn't out yet at that point. The various skin textures all began with the pale flesh map from the "Daiwa's Dominion" set by DanieNMarforno, which each were then painted over and blended with a variety of fishscale maps taken from Mada's "Lost Realms", "Kalypso" by D9Studios, and Blazewolf's "Aquaria" set. The fin appendages were also taken from "Lost Realms", which I morphed and parented to the figures where I wanted them (slightly tricky business, that), and added matching texture maps from the various sets mentioned. For full credits on all the clothing and props used to build this scene you can view the Character Model Sheets for each of these figures up on my website at www.fantasycastlebooks.com, and read more about the making of this image there and at my blog, as well as seeing it with the relevant story text added.