The Final: Dragon
MAY 8, 2007
This is my sketch for this assignment; Dragon
This is a George Stubbs I referred to and my Chinese Princess for Scholastic's Royal Diaries series.
And this one. The cool surprise for me was how great he was at landscape. I never quite considered that when looking at his work.
The head in the first sketch was not so great and not the look I was going for. I wanted to paint a white dragon. A gentle elegant beast. This first sketch was in my head from a Business Week cover I did not long ago. It just flowed from my pen. So I did these revised heads. Cassius, my son, said the one on the left was the best and the other looked like a dog. He was right.
This is the sketch with the new head. It's now more elegant.
Before going to finish I have to do a value study. In that study I figure out the setting and how this dragon would be lit. The fact that I made everything up and am drawing from my head means that the preparation for the final art is vital.
In class, on gessoed illustration board I begin the drawing. The drawing is in white charcoal, sepia charcoal, white and brown Gouache and some color pencil. My laptop shows me my final sketch.
Here is a close up
After getting down the dragon, I need it to fit in an environment. This was the most difficult part of the process, but fun.
I love my class, and they have watched me do paintings in class as demonstrations before. The cool thing about me working on this was they were as into their own illustration as I was mine. Here is proof.
At this point I have my drawing complete and have added some blue charcoal pencil to the sky and have designed some clouds to frame this dragon in the scene.
In preparation to airbrush some contrast into this drawing and do the cloud drawing, I photocopy the drawing and cut out the dragon as a template.
Here is the artwork before oils and after some airbrush. My class did watch this part. I taught myself airbrush in college. These kids leaned airbrush in photoshop first and have never seen a real one in action. They were riveted. I paint with it mostly in white and brown and in the end felt that it was going exactly as I had hoped. There are great things that happen to a drawing while your doing it. This one proved to be full of surprises. I hope the final art is just as satisfying.
Dragon
© 2024 Tim O'Brien