Dragon's Revisited [Come on in folks]

*Tallarn applauds the efforts of all*

Just skimming through and glancing at each one, I love them! Well done all. I'll try and come back another day with some more constructive criticism, but here's a big WOW! from me in the meantime.

Looks good. Wish I could show off my work but no way to it.

Malessa's not feeling very well today. Perhaps she'll be back on her feet enough to shuffle over to the 'puter chair tomorrow and give some feedback.

Nice. Gives the idea of dragon-as-animal, which I'm rather fond of. Dangit, it didn't reply with the pic. Well, it's Liquide's last one.

Makes me wish my scanner wasn't busted...I would love to participate.

brak1 said:

Well, here's my first attempt/failure. At some point I began to realize I wasn't accomplishing what I had hoped and that I wasn't going to finish it. I'll try again later.

One of the things I wanted to do was to give that fully armored sense of a dragon, covered in scales and impervious to harm. However, as I went on I realized that the wings were not going to fit into that idea - how do you armour wings and yet make them believable for use in flying?

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I like what I see so far on the scales and armor. The only thing that bothers me, and this is my own taste, was the teeth need to look sharper.

Some really cool dragons there, folks! Malessa's latest dragon reminded me a lot of Valerie Valusek's work back in 2E. Liquide's wingless dragon was cool, bearing some resemblance to Lockwood's black dragon.

Wolvorine, I really liked your leonine dragon, very Oriental in style. Try adding boar's tusks to the lower jaw, and a full mane going over the neck a bit. It also reminded me of a Ki-Rin (check the cover of Oriental Adventures 1E, by Jeff Easley).

Here are some tips on drawing dragons:

The anatomy: When drawing the skeletal dragon for Counter Pack: Dragons, I had to look over some pictures of animal skeletons, so I went over a lion, a bat and a brontosaurus. Picture this: Take a brontosaurus' neck, spine and tail, slap those on a lion's ribcage, fore and hindquarter's (but please do shrink the bronto, ok? ). Then take a bat's wings and place them just a bit behind the lion shoulders. Now cover with the apropriate muscles. A dove has strong pectorals for the flapping, so look at that for a dragon's "wing pectorals".

The pose: You have NO idea how hard it is to fit a dragon in a 4x2 inch rectangle...

Here's a nice trick: draw the spine of the dragon in a single line, from the tip of the tail to the base of the head, as if he were a snake of sorts. Avoid brisk turns, since it's the creature's spine. If the dragon is turning his head to see an enemy behind him, he'll turn his head, his neack and at least a bit of his forequarters.

The scales: look at pictures from crocodiles and iguanas for peebly-looking dragons (could be good for blues and blacks, who live in environments similar to gila monsters, iguanas and crocs). Iguanas also serve as cool resources for reds (specially the giant Galapago ones). For white, try fish scales, which are smaller. I like fish scales for metallic dragons, since they too have metallic hues.

I just did several new dragon pictures for a new edition of Counter Pack: Dragons (which was a special GenCon release), where I did full-bodied dragons, hatchlings of all cromatics (so cuuuute), plus some cool half-dragons. Ever tried doing that half red/half ogre from the MM Appendix? A really cool villain for a 3rd level party.

Draw On!

Liquide said:

Well here is my wingless dragon, even though one pictures dragon with wings I wanted to try one without wings in this take.

It is still a draft but I wanted to play around with odd poses and I wanted to create an inpressive horned beast.

So here we go folks.

Oh and Malessa and Wolv0rine I want your input folks

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This is impressive all right, I like the mouth and horns and such. Still doesn't remind me of a dragon though, but thats my taste. What if you tried combining your first dragon pic with this one, that might be cool?

32 years old, drawing and doodling my whole life and it took a liquide thread to get me to start thinking about how dragons are shaped...here is a page of warm-up sketches and stylization notes.

Dalamar said:

Now that's one impressive beast, Liquide.

It seems to me his/her plating in the neck changes the 'order' of the plates. That is, from the second to last spike, the ones that are further from the head are under but from the spike towards the head it's vice versa. You get what I mean?
The same effect is with the plating in the tail as compared to the chest. These aren't things you notice on first sight but I paid attention to because I messed the scales on the dragon I posted (check the forelimbs).

Otherwise, very impressive. Altho I personally miss the scaly look. But that's just a matter of taste.

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Well the plating order was a mistake on my part (I intended it to look the same all over), but now I can remodel it a bit and it will still look OK (even when it changes over) so it is not a big un. He was fun to draw in any case and I really enjoyed doing the horns since curved horns are usually very hard to get right (I think I nailed that in this sketch at least).

For scales I usually stick away from them until after I get most of the muscle lines and some line shading done since it is easier to place them then. And on another note I also stick away from small scales since they have a tendency to look "odd" when you puts lots of them on a large body (can be done in a good manner but it is hard to execute it properly).

Thanks for the comment, and good that you likes it in whole