David Petersen's Blog: Lava Lion Dragon

Last Friday on my Twitch Stream, we did the #DiscoveringDragons Community-Draw-Along! It's a fun event where I welcome all skill levels to push their pencils (or whatever tools they use to make art).

I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on Monday we shared our finished pieces.

Here is my finished colored Dragon. And below are my steps to create it as well as the community submissions.

For #DiscoveringDragons, I post two or three prompt words for everyone to make into a dragon. It's a nice framework for artists of any skill level to focus some time on an 'assignment' to shake the rust off or get the pencil moving again––all while also being loose enough that there's plenty of room for individual expression and interpretation.

This month the prompt was two words: Lava & Lion.

I opened several tabs of google image searches of dragons, Lava flows, Lions, Stone sculptures of lions, etc.

In my 'Dragon' search tab, I found an illustration for a Magic Card with a dragon flying with the rear legs tucking under it while breathing fire. I used that pose as the start for my piece.

Even before that I knew I wanted my lion headed dragon to be vomiting lava, so the head pose needed to work with that. I sketched the head and body on a sheet of copy paper, and then scanned it into photoshop as I blocked in some wings using clip art as a guide.

When the wing clip art was where I wanted after some resizing, warping, etc. I printed it out and drew lava versions over the top in pencil on a light pad. The entire drawing was merged in Photoshop and tinted to make seeing it a little easier.

The printout was taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Using a lightpad, I was able to see through the surface of the bristol as I inked the dragon. I used Copic Multiliner 0.3 and 0.5 SP pen to ink the art.

The inking on this piece was all about texture and trying to retain some of the subtlety around the lion's face from the pencils (most of which I think I lost). I found that the later pencils on the tail and wings were the easiest to ink, and that might be that they were more open areas, unlike the forms of the lion's face.

I was unable to get the inks finished before my stream ended but I wished the viewers all luck with their pieces and told them we'd take a look at everyone's work on Monday.

After some dinner, I came back up to the studio and finished inking the piece and then scanned the bristol to start the color flatting process––basically professional coloring-in-the-lines. First step was creating color holds (areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) for the entire dragon as well as the lighter ones around the eyes, in the wings, horns, and the lava flow. Then I flatted in two colors: the overall creature, and the lighter bits.

For the final colors I did do a bit of painting with the paintbrush tool, but did most of the highlights, shading, and texture with the dodge and burn tools and a stock photoshop texture brush. Below you can again see the final rendered dragon.