Dragons made easy

[Tabian]

Hi everybody, here is a pretty neat way of how to draw a dragon. I started off by drawing dragons’ heads in a sketch pad but they started to look like horses heads so I set out to see what animal would give me a good dragon body. After trying a number of different animals ranging from bears to cows I finally settled on dogs. After selecting a head and a body I set about tracing rough shapes to represent the head, body, rear leg and the tail. It is best to draw complex objects as individual pieces; it just makes things easier for readjusting position and scaling of say the tail if the full tail section is in one group. The same for the head, legs, body and so on. I may add some wings and a crest at some stage if I intend to use it in a composition.

[gwpriester]

I'll file this away in case I should ever be faced with the challenge.

[Rik]

What a great way of demonstrating how to go about things.
Brilliant.
Thanks for sharing your ideas, Tabian.

[wizard509]

Very effective and brilliant method Tabian.

[angelize]

That's very clever Tabian!

[Albacore]

What a good illustration. Like the softness and how you achieved, I would call it dirties, the texture of the drawing. Was it done all with transparencies or did you do it as I would and take it into PS.

[Tabian]

This is a quick look at how I created the dragon’s skin.
Once I had drawn the main segments of the dragon i.e., the head, body, legs and tail they then needed fleshing out and something resembling a texture (sort of snake like). To start with are the scales and plenty of them. First make one scale shape then apply a bevel, clone the shape and move it to one side so that it just over laps the first one. Group these two and clone again, keep doing this until you have a workable section of scales, the next step is to apply an ellipse transparency this is so you can hide the hard edges and makes it easier to bend the scales round twisting bodies. As you apply the scales to the dragon, be sure to make the scale bigger on the back, smaller on the legs and tapering away down the tail. Now this last bit is where it really gets good. Select the base shape of the section of the dragon that you are working on and clone it, fill with plasma and apply a stained glass transparency. Now group all the contents of that section to keep them safe, apply highlights and shade with the shape tool. With the shades I like to feather the edges and use a transparency be that linear, circular or whatever the shape you are drawing demands. With the highlights I use feather edge only, add shades and highlights into the now finished group.
So the rabbit is out of the hat...!

[handrawn]

they are very good scales, thanks for that

[gray]

Super way of doing this type of illustration, Tabian.

[Fred vanderZee]

I am drawing a Chinese/Tibetan style dragon: this is an overview of all the animal parts that make up these dragons.

This dragon will be included in the Namgyalma-image I am currently working on.

And yes, I will post some results here.