Making of Dunkleosteus

There are many ways to color your painting. Here is one of mine - using the clipping mask and layers with the attribute overlay.

1.: when you have done your sketch, you start with black on white. mention: using this technique it is better to keep the black on a different layer than the white color.

2.:a clipping mask to the first layer including a fading from red to blue. take a new layer, give it the attribute "overlay" and choose a light color. in this case i chose some sort of cream-white. paint some highlights but mention: dont let the dark areas touch the highlights! -that destroys the illusion of 3-dimensionality!

3.:after another highlight-area, we do the same thing as we have done with the foreground:
black on white - clippingmask - overlay.
feel free to use another overlay-layer to make your highlights occour stronger.

4.: the same procedure, while finishing the "back-background".
then a new layer in front doing the atmosphere of the underwater area.

5.: and now ... a quite similar thing with our deep sea creature again:
color - black - ...

6.: ...overlay.
some color-adjustments have still to be done. just do another layer and give it the attribute color. if it looks too extreme, just pull down the opacity. cheers!