Part 2 – Drawing the Dragon
This is part 2 in a series of posts sharing much of the creation process for my Rainy Day Dragon. My previous post was about the brainstorming phase. I’m excited to share this with you as this drawing was jurried into the Tiny Dragons Art Book Project by Art Order, LLC. You have the opportunity to own three 3″x3″ choc full of amazing dragon art by artists from around the world. My dragon will be in the Not So Tiny Dragons book. Check out the Kickstarter Campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artorder/tiny-dragons-art-project
The Making of a (Not so) Tiny Dragon
In this stage I worked out how I wanted the dragon to look, how I wanted the composition to work.
This is the initial rough pencil sketch. I liked this one because of the overlapping leaves and the shape of the dragon’s head. It made me smile.
At this stage I usually work on layers of tracing paper. I scanned the rough sketch, enlarged it, and printed it. On a sheet of tracing paper over the printout, I refined the dragon. On a second layer of tracing paper I worked out the leaves. Tracing paper allows me to move elements around, erase parts independently, and generally gives me more freedom with composition.
Designing the leaves was an interesting challenge. I needed to figure out how I wanted the leaves to be placed so there would be interesting negative space and some visual flow through the picture. The leaves are basically arrows pointing all over and they needed to be organized without looking too similar, or pointing to nothing, or too evenly spaced. I think I solved a lot of the visual problems.
I also started collecting or creating reference. I needed to know what an animal crouching or laying on a branch might look like so I searched for animals lying and crouching. I also looked up rain, and water drops.
I took photos of my lilac bush both dry and wet. I poured some water on the leaves to see what that would look like. I put water droplets on branches and took photos to study. Then it rained so I was able to capture actual rainy day reference from different spots around our yard and have a fresh experience instead of relying on faded memory. It was all coming together and I was excited about the picture.
Next week, post 3, Rainy Day Dragon Drawing.