Tao'tieh

The Tao'tieh from J L Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, 

painted as part of a demo at the Ringling College of Art & Design.

(The below approach was heavily influenced by the inimitable Sam Neilson.
Pay him a visit, if you haven't already.)

1. Graphite drawing, scanned & cleaned in Photoshop

2. Illustrator "live trace"(converting to vector for scaling purposes). 

3. Local color pass

4. Ambient lighting pass

5. Direct lighting pass

6. Steps 2-5 combined; the final (topmost) image has cleanup and layer effects added. 

Imaginary Beings

When not sketching environments or people, we all also sketched beasts from Borges's The Book of Imaginary Beings. Seeing everyone's different take on a base concept is always fun; it's a great exercise. Here are scans of a couple of mine. Perhaps I'll clean them up a bit and add color / rendering as time permits.

HUMBABA 

Humbaba, a giant from the epic of Gilgamesh, is described as having brassy scales, vulture talons, lion's paws, the horns of a bull, and the head of a serpent on the end of his tail and "generative organ". He defends the forest from Enkidu and Gilgamesh.

T'AO T'IEH (饕餮)

The T'ao-T'ieh (Taotie,饕餮) is a beast from Chinese mythology, described as having the giant head of a dragon, tiger, or person atop two bodies, with a shared set of forearms. The T'ao-T'ieh was also described as an "ogre-mask", inspired by the "devil of symmetry". It serves as a warning against self-indulgence. (Fitting to have sketched this while in Amsterdam.)