Lava Creature

So first off for this project I collected images into a mood board as normal.

Then I created some sketches/roughs to get my ideas down quickly.

So I decided to pick the first guy, top left, but I did like the worm dude a lot.

So this is my final concept. At first I started with a silhouette but quickly decided I wouldn't be able to make a very believable rocky surface so I found an image of some rocks and chopped it up to use on my monster. Then I went round the guy adding in lava cracks with an inner and outer glow on the layer style. The lava lake was made using the same layer style. Then came the background image and texture images for the lava cracks. I also generated some clouds and added a mask to them to make them blend in. To top it all off I added a gradient map which just made all the colours better. Ta Da! :D