Photoshop is a great tool for creature creators. You can use it to create composites, or use its digital painting toolset, as shown here, to create fine art and concept drawings. In this course, artist Rayce Bird takes a hand-drawn sketch and brings it to life in Photoshop, showing how to use one particular feature, layer styles, to make interesting and realistic textures for a well-known fantasy creature: a satyr.

Topics include:

Importing a sketch into Photoshop
Adding gray shades and smudging
Introducing color, shadows, and highlights
Adding texture with layer styles
Using blur to concentrate the viewer's eye
Color correcting the final image