David Petersen's Blog: Royal Taloned Octopus 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 (twenty first 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 three words: Octopus, Talon, & Royal

I opened several tabs of google image searches of octopus species, bird talons, and crowns.

I started on copy paper with the body form of a Blue Ringed Octopus and then added on a taller dragon head and a bit of a hood like a King Cobra (adding to the Royal prompt). That loose sketch was taken into Photoshop where I added blocky colors to help refine and define the overall shape and silhouette. I also put in a pale green to be the underbelly so I could keep track of where a tentacle would have suckers or not. With that rougher version bolstered with color shape design, I printed it out and did a tighter pencil drawing over it on a clean sheet of paper on my Huion lightpad.

With the tighter pencil drawing done, I wend back into Photoshop and blocked in some flat colors to again help me see which parts were which (negative space, underbelly, top skin, shin pattern, etc. but also to just get me closer to envisioning what my goal was for the final image.

In some ways, this step was unnecessary and superfluous––I did a good enough job with the pencils that I could tell where the underbelly and suckers were to get the ink texture right in the next step...but I really do like trusting in this process of mine. It did make me think harder about how I was going to ink the skin pattern knowing what the final color issues would be.

With the above design printed out at full scale and taped that onto the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol, it was time to start inking. 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 about balancing the lighter hand I needed to not overwork the underbelly and to get the details on the suckers looking fleshy, and then being more textured and heavy-handed when it came to the skin pattern.

I wasn't able to finish my inks on stream 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 inking the last few tentacles and then scanned the inks and started 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 skin pattern got two different color holds and the pupil got one as well.

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 add some color variance to each area before using the dodge and burn tools to do the final rendering.
Below you can again see the final Dragon...