Personal Project: “Dragon”
This project is still ongoing! I’m not really sure when I’ll finish it, as it was very ambitious at the time and other projects have taken precedence over it since. That said, I’m very proud of this piece even though I haven’t had the chance to finish it yet. One day I hope I will complete it fully!
“Dragon” - it’s not a very inspired name, I know - is really a piece that got a little bit out of control. I never intended for it to become as big as it did when I first began working on it, and it was really just a sketch that I was doing to pass the time. See, I love dragons and I love drawing dragons, and they’re often what I doodle in my free time between projects when I’ve been bitten by the art bug. This one, though. There was something about this one that I really liked. The more I worked on it, the more I wanted to see just how far I could push myself. In its current state, “Dragon” has been worked on for well over twenty hours across two different programs!
Gallery of progress:
Building the Dragon
“Hand drawn scales were probably the worst decision I made… but they’re easily the best part of the entire image when you view it now.”
As you can see in the gallery above that goes through each stage of the process, the dragon really didn’t start life as anything particularly incredible. I was quite happy with the pose that I had sketched in the concept stage; it was a bit different to the ones I normally sketched, with an angle that made it feel like you were looking up at the dragon.
As I began defining the sketch and adding details to it, I found I increasingly liked how it looked. I kept everything on the same layer to give myself a little bit of a fun challenge, and added some depth to the dragon by establishing shadows where I wanted them, adding a few finer details to the horns and face and added some patches of scales. At this stage, I still hadn’t planned on doing a full piece. Eventually as I worked, I decided that I really wanted to push the limits of my normal drawings, and I began to really go into detail with the scales - all over the body. Hand drawn scales were probably the worst decision I made throughout this entire process, but they’re easily the best part of the entire image when you view it now.
By the time I had done those, I decided that it wasn’t enough to just be a sketch any more and I had invested too much time into it to leave it as a sketch. I coloured the lines of the dragon from blue to black to see whether or not it still looked good and, deciding that it looked very good, I set to work on defining the background. In stark contrast to the dragon, I wanted the background to have no visible lineart at all. This didn’t take as long as I expected it to and honestly I really like what I achieved! I’m proud of the background mountains and I spent quite a bit of time on the clouds trying to emulate a sort of “fishbowl” effect entirely by hand.
Once the background was done, I coloured in the flats for the dragon. I decided to go with a purple palette for it, inspired by an old roleplay character of mine that I had drawn many, many years before. It was a simple two colour palette, as I decided to abandon the jet black of the body in favour of a muted purple that would still fit well with the lighter lavender horns and wing leather. Once the flats were established, I dived straight into shading and lighting.
The level of detail I’d committed to by drawing the scales was a blessing and a curse for this image. It was a blessing because it allowed me to be just as meticulous and detailed with shading, making some scales visibly darker while making others lighter. Honestly, I really love how this turned out in the places that I did it and I think it adds some fantastic depth to the image. It was a curse however because it took hours of my time, zoomed all the way into my canvas until I was just staring at scales. I would be a liar if I said that the sheer amount of effort and time the scales take to draw and shade weren’t part of the reason that I eventually left the project alone, especially as I became more strapped for time. Still, despite this, they’re definitely worth the effort that went into them, I think!
I’m hoping in the future that I can find the time (and perhaps, a little bit of force of will) to pick this project back up again and truly finish it. But to this day it’s one of the pieces I’m the proudest of, which is also why the dragon shows up on the banner of the Airy Aerie on the home page and the portfolio main page!