David Petersen's Blog: Twin Many-Winged Hare Dragons

Last week 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). It takes place on the first Friday of the month.

I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on the following 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 three words: Many-Winged, Twin, & Hare

I opened several tabs of google image searches of hares boxing each other, twin dragon coils, and various wing shapes.

I started on copy paper with the head of the right hare and then worried about how the two would twist and mirror knot together, so I scanned it into Photoshop and started digitally blocking out a body form and mirroring and moving the other layer until I got a placement that worked.

I printed that version out and on a lightpad and a fresh sheet of paper I redrew the twin's face and designed the bat ear-wings (after a false start with feathered bird wing ears) before scanning it back in to Photoshop to color block the rough you see here.

I printed out the above design at full scale and taped that onto 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 0.7 pen to ink the art.

The inking on this piece was mostly just about respecting the contour lines from the pencils and enhancing them with line-weight, while also not overworking anything to make it muddy. I finished the inks on-stream, but then afterwards decided I wanted to add a little texture inside the bat wings, so I inked those in before scanning it.

Later that same night after some dinner I started the coloring process. After prepping the digital scan of the inks, I established a color hold (an area where I want the ink to be a color other than black)––the overall lines became a dark brown and then a smaller hold on the pupils.

Then it was time to start the color flatting process––basically professional coloring-in-the-lines. Some of this is just to make it easy to re-isolate various parts when doing later painting & rendering. Some of of the colors were established in the rough, but I played with the final value/hue choices for a while before getting to this point.

For the final colors I used the dodge and burn tools to add shadows and highlights to give the dragons some form. Most of the work was getting the shadows where the interwoven knotting is happening.
Below you can again see the final Dragon...