Gourdian not

At a farm stand I found a small ornamental gourd.  It had beautiful colors of green, orange, and yellow.  Other than the fact that it was the wrong color, it looked like a claw foot found often on US Colonial furniture.  So I bought it.  After about a week of staring at it I decided that I had to turn it into a raptor's talons holding a sphere. Given the color of the gourd, it had to be a dragon.  A dragon holding a pearl is a classic motif in Chinese art.

This is a typical Photoshop composite.  The pearl is a circle that is shaded by a circular gradient. The talons were drawn with the pen tool and shaded by hand.  Turning gentle ridges on the side of the gourd into round claws with talons required a lot of careful dodging and burning. Elements that were close to each other had to have appropriate shadows.  The pearl is iridescent, so it had to show some color bleed from the yellow claws.