Silhouettes in Photoshop

We had another lesson in 2D art. Today we were told that we were going to discover a new way to paint models in Photoshop. We were going to draw the silhouettes first then we will be filling in the detail later. This was an interesting transaction for me as I hadn't been doing digital drawing for long and am still searching for a style of my own.

We watched a video which was taught by a professional artist in Singapore. He showed us the ways of the silhouettes and how to shade it. So  we were given the task by Steve to create a Crustacean based monster. 3 of them, completely shaded with a touch of color to them.

An earlier version.

I found this task very difficult, the shape of the creature, I could come up with, no problem, its just the shading that really got me. I attempted several times to get the shading right on these characters and it just wasn't working.

My "final".

I prefer the way that I done it in the earlier version, as the characters look more realistic and believable, its just I needed to have something complete so I completely rushed this. The three silhouettes at the start took me ten minutes to complete.

I was extremely disappointed with the result that I got, but it is a learning curve for me. I know that if I'm going to do something, I need to put my heart and soul into it, because if I don't, whats the point in trying, all I'm going to end up with will be the results that you see before you. Pictures that have bought my confidence in digital drawing down by a large amount.

I hope eventually I could come back to this project and safely say "How did I do so terrible? Thats really easy to do?".