Hey everyone, time for another post! Recently I was assigned a project for one of my classes to create a chimera, of sorts, out of three different animals. We were tasked with stitching it together in Photoshop to produce the finished product. Unfortunately for me the animals that I chose, crab, cuttlefish, and octopus, are apparently really difficult to find high resolution photos of. Which meant I had to get a little creative to execute my concept. It was super fun to work on, so I'm gonna dedicate this post to showing you how I did it.

I needed a background that would showcase the creatures habitat as this was one of the criteria for completing the assignment, so I picked a photo I took of a local beach.

Next I pulled up a couple references I found online and put them into my Photoshop document. I chose a cooked crab claw for a little humor.

After that it was time to draw the outline of my creature, since I wasn't able to find any images that would have been big enough for me to manipulate in Photoshop I had to create this guy from scratch.

My next step was to paint in a little grey inside the silhouette I created, this is what's going to help the texture that I'll be overlaying next to show up. I was careful to try and match the direction of the light in the image when painting in the grey, that way it makes the image more believable. Well, as believable as a giant hybrid monster sitting on a beach can be anyway.

Since I now had the base for my texture ready, it was time to apply that texture. I found a photo of octopus skin that looked pretty decent, cut it up and blended it all together, and that left me with something I could overlay. All of that gave me this...

Looking pretty good here. Now the next important part was adding in the crab claws. I just duplicated a couple of them after removing the white background they were on, changed their sizes just a little bit so that they'd each look appropriately closer or farther away from the viewer, then put them where they needed to be. I also painted a bit of the color on each claw down on the tentacles so that it blended a bit better.

At this point I've almost got a complete creature, however something's not quite right. It's just kinda floating there in space, it needs a shadow to ground it in the image. I also wanted to add the marks it would have made getting from the ocean to the beach, so it was time to paint those in.

Now that the shadow underneath the creature has been taken care of, it's time to make sure that all of the parts of the creature that should be in shadow reflect that fact. Again looking at the light that's in the photo I took, which is slightly behind the subject I'm painting, I added some dark blue to color in the shadowed areas.

We're in the homestretch at this point, now it's time for just a few finishing touches. So this guy might look menacing right now, but he can't quite look at anything since he doesn't actually have eyes. I simply took the eye of a cuttlefish photo I found online, cut it out, painted a shadow underneath, and pasted it in place. I had to manipulate the one on the other side with the liquefy tool to give it it's rounded appearance.

With that done it was time to add the signature frill of the cuttlefish along the head of my creature. This was accomplished by making a quick selection with the marquee tool on the front of the head and behind the head to outline the frill area. Next the frill was filled in with a creamy yellow color I sampled from the crab claws and then made slightly transparent using the layer opacity slider. Once that was done I took some dark blue found in the buildings in the background and painted in some color on top. After all of that I ended up with this.

So that's it! There you go! One Giant Octocuddlecrab on a beach. Since you made it this far through the process your reward is the finished version that I added a description to, and turned in for a grade. I hope you all enjoyed reading about what it took to make this creature. 'Till next post, later!