David Petersen's Blog: Infant Melon Dragon

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 (twentieth in the series). 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: Infant & Melon

I opened several tabs of google image searches of baby dragons, watermelons, & cantaloupes.

I started on copy paper with the body form of my baby dragon. I thought of going with more of a cute swaddled infant of a chibi character, and opted for this young looking dragon shape. I'd originally planned to use a watermelon as my melon reference––but Julia suggested I look up a 'horned melon'.

Using my lightpad, over the top of my pencils for the dragon shape, I drew new details of the horned melon and the inner fruit-seeds for the belly and tail vines/leaves. All of these pencils were scanned into Photoshop and assembled with some quick color blocking to get my layout where I wanted it.

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 a subtle affair of getting the horned melon rind texture right, and then using lighter weight lines for the seeds (imbedded in the fruit) and a slightly different texture of the leaves.

I was able to finish my inks on stream and even started the coloring process before having to sign off an wish every one success over the weekend with their Dragons. Later that same night after some dinner I finished the flatting process. In addition to the basics of color flatting–basically professional coloring-in-the-lines, I also established color holds (an area where I want the ink to be a color other than black)––the overall lines became a dark brown the belly became a medium green, the seeds a light green, the pupils red, and the leave veins dark green.

Most of of the color selections were already 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 a bit of the paintbrush to make the tip of each 'horn' of the melon skin a darker orange, and then the dodge and burn tools to add shadows and highlights to give the dragons some form.
Below you can again see the final Dragon...