Part 01- Starting my Bee and forgetting the Stag.

Okay. I admit it. I originally wanted to create my second digital compositing creature as a Stag. But having tried a little and discovering that it was a very hard animal to create, due to its complex body shape, making the fur and shading rather difficult, I changed my tact and decided to create a Bee.
I went with a bee because I had a strong idea about how to represent the majority of its body shape. I like to have a body that I can make with the materials (organic or inorganic) in full. That way I can use the light in real time to create shadowing and contour in the original photo. Then I can work with adding textures, body parts, coloring and shading. It make the work flow faster if I have a model that is more or less accurate to the body shape I am going for. Then I can make smaller changes in Photoshop around the Warping and Skew tools.

So....
Here is the original background I've shot for the Bee to be in. It is  from my own garden, I wanted the bee to be interacting with a flower. And I choose this one because the scale seemed right and it had a strong yellow tone in the image.

Okay. Now to shoot the parts of the Bee...