Thanqol Learns To Draw!

[Thanqol]

Yay, lots of dragons!

Day 261: Drawing from references is always good. The first thing I noticed when I compared your drawing to the reference was that yours is a bit stouter and broader, but other than that it looks good.
One thing that I've learned about drawing from picture references (or copying a smaller sketch onto a larger canvas), is that it helps a lot to quarter the image that your referencing, and the canvas/paper/digital canvas/whatever that you're copying it onto. It makes it so much easier to get the proportions right.
One thing that you could try with a reference like that dragon, if you're interested, would be to try to map out the bone structure and muscles of the dragon. Here, you're mostly just copying the lines, but I think you could learn a lot if you tried to copy the muscles and how they wrap around the bones and the subtle shapes that they form.

Musculature is on the list, it just got pushed down because I was greedy and wanted to start drawing full dragons right away. I've got a significant Dragons art folder and a lot of books full of dragon art so I've got plenty of reference for when I do the musculature picture.

Day 262: Aww, it's a little dragon! I like how it looks so angry, yet is so tiny. The book is a simple yet effective way of showing the scale. I also really like the feet. The only thing I don't like about that drawing is the shape of the wings: Wings have a lot of joints in them, and so it looks wierd if they're perfectly straight like the dragon's right wing. Also, more of a stylistic preference/realism obsession of mine, but generally I think that dragon wings look better when the wing membrane attaches at the mid back or hip, as opposed to the shoulder (this is why I have issues with the design of the dragons in Skyrim).

I am prepared to concede this point, I think that the kind of skeletal wing design doesn't really look very impressive.

Day 263: I really like the picture of the dragon's head. It looks so . . . dragon-y. The horns, the scales, the teeth and mouth, the eye, the horny ridges over and under its eye. Great job.

I'm going to be doing a bunch of the other D&D dragons in this style ^^

Day 264: Ooh, neat. I like the gradient background, and the glowing white and gold looks really nice. I was reminded of this when I saw it (in a oh that's so cool it reminds me of this one really awesome picture way, not a that's been done before way). It's a shame that you had to rush it, since it would probably be even more cool if you had been able to spend more time on it, but yeah, Skyrim is known to do that .

I've got another picture in a similar style (pure paints as I'm calling it, as opposed to linework-paints or linework-fills) on the list, so hopefully that one will make up for it. I learned some cool stuff about lighting from this which'll be applied in the future.

Day 266: A little sci-fi companion dragon? Awesome. I really like this picture. You played around with angle some, with the ground slightly skewed, the whole dark atmosphere is nicely done, and that is some nice anatomy and pose work. That's a tricky pose, trying to make a character look relaxed and casual instead of stiff, but man, you nailed it. And I agree, those gauntlets are sweet. The only issue I have with this piece is the tower/skyscraper thing: the ground and character are tilted at an angle, but the skyscraper isn't, and it kind of messes up the whole perspective a bit, when you start looking at it closely. Other than that, awesome job.

Thank you I think my biggest experimental innovation with this one was doing my sketch layer in different colours (at last) so I could tell all the different components apart rather than bluelining everything. Very minor change, but such a big help when it came to inking.

I was pretty worried throughout that there was going to be clashing due to the variety of colours, but I trusted my instincts and kept everything extremely muted and it paid off.

The skyscraper is actually tilted at an angle, check it with a ruler. But if the tilt isn't right then the tilt isn't right.

I'm still not sure why I find myself preferring the delicious version to the original.