I admire your dragon work so much! (Both wings of fire and your own ocs!) I think it’s beautiful and amazing the way you add scale texture, and I wanted to ask how you do it! I struggle a lot with it, so it’s super impressive to me :d
Secondly it honestly depends on what I’m going for! (Or how lazy im feeling on the rare chance that i decide to do scales)
With the Goldfish Seawing design I made a few months ago, I honestly used the gradients of the base to blend in and out as the colour shifted (basically just colour picking and adding to the gradient to add some funk to the design) shifting the value of the selected colour can also work as seen in the darker patches on the scales
Sometimes I also cheap out a little, using textured brushes that are splattered in shape can make a pseudo scale texture?
Sure I added some minor scale definitions along the neck and torso, but most of this is just a textured brush doing its job! (Another example of just slightly shifting the colours)
(I use this same technique for my oc design Hydrurga)
And the last thing is in the past I’ve used a scale brushpack! They are pretty easy to mess around with and most come with some form of colour variation in the actual pattern
the ones I use are Procreate only I think.. take that with a grain of salt as I cant remember seeing it being advertised for any other program.. but just slap in “ (program) scale brush/pens “ and some should come up.
Example of where Ive used a scale texture brush:
9/10 times I normally just slather a textured brush as a clipping mask over any of my scaled Characters and setting to a different layer property until I stumble across a result I like! Occasionally going in to add minor details if I feel like it
Hopefully this helps somewhat.. it may be a little ramble-y since its currently very early for me..
Best I can say is just trial and error! Find something that comes easy to you!
I would also recommend looking at animals with scales, I primarily look at lizards or fish (animals change depending on the character I’m drawing lol but I think ykwim) and seeing how light reflects off them to make them stand out or how they’re placed or if the colour differentiates from one place to another
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