Dragon Painting

Right, I am back in Bristol for the weekend so I have decided to update my blog for the Digital painting.  The process from start to finish.

This image started out as doodle bout a year ago.  I was sitting waiting for a disc to finish burning for a college project and scribbled an image down.

It was just an idea at the time.  A beast that a character would ride.  If my memory serves me right it was a potential beast for a bounty hunter, but he went down another route.  I had come across the image a couple of times since and really wanted to do something with it.  

This next image is a painting that my dad did whilst he was at Uni.  I have always loved it and took inspiration from this for my image.

I wanted to link my image with this one not only visually but as a story too.  I have always wondered where this knight is off to.  I imagined grand adventures.  So I based my image around that idea.  I decided that if this was an image of the knight leaving on a quest my image would be his return.  It was meant in a very loose sense.  I did not want to copy the knight as that was my dad's creation, I wanted my own visualization from that theme.

So these were my primary sketches.

From these I used photoshop to put together a rough idea of where I wanted to go.

I did however have trouble working out what to do with the wings.  I couldn't decide what was the best corse of action

I decided to start working on the colour and see how the whole image developed and worry about the wings later.  As it was my first proper digital painting, I was a little unsure where to go at first.   I was just playing really to see how close to actual painting in colours, brush strokes and textures you could get.

 I wanted the wings to be a prominent feature in the image, something almost beautiful as well as imposing. Many sketches followed to try and resolve the problem, but I couldn't come up with anything that I found really worked. I also wanted the Knight to be a focal point so having the wings coming too far over his head shut him too much.  I looked a bird wings, other dragon images trying to get some insight.

Here are some sheets of reference I used for this image.

I finally came up with this pencil sketch of some wings from a cormorant.

I leds the idea of feathers against the scales.  Soft against hard.  

I tried different sketches of knights in armour, whilst looking through my research.  As my dad was a freelance illustrator, I wanted to get it right.  I could have designed my own knight from the refernece but when I found this image, I decided that I would use it.  It fit perfectly with the idea that it was a knight coming back from a quest.  Slowly ambling along.

I added the leg from my reference and happy with the knight, moved onto the rest of the dragon.  

 And the finished image.  I say finished, I don't think I will ever truely finish an image.  I hit the deadline.  I can always continue.  I am always learning new and better ways to do things.