David Petersen's Blog: Baltimore Yearbook 2026: Savage Dragon

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Baltimore Yearbook 2026: Savage Dragon

Every year the Baltimore Comic Con has published a convention art book called 'The Baltimore Yearbook' that features a character or property, where that creator is a guest of the convention. Selected guest artists are asked to contribute a piece of fan art for the book to celebrate the creator and property. It allows us to play in someone's world, and offers a chance for attendees to meet new creators as they go around the show floor collecting autographs in their yearbook.

This year's subject is Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon! To the left you can see my finished art, and below in the blogpost I'll walk through my process.

When I received the invitation email wondered what I'd do with Savage Dragon. I tend not to draw superheroes––but as he's also kinda like drawing a monster, I was up for the challenge. First thought was to have him holding the Black Axe in smoldering ruins in a pile or dead weasels––or holding dead weasels.

I tried drawing over top of a 3D posable bulky life drawing figure (lower left), but didn't care for the result and opted for more action. Looking at some swinging axe poses I thumbnailed the upper left image and then did more complete pencils over top of that (which spilled on to another sheet of paper for his legs).

The tighter pencil drawings were scanned and the upper body and lower body were assembled together into a template for the technical specs of the Yearbook's formatting.

I painted in some color blocking for Savage Dragon himself and added some smoke plumes as well as a 3D model of the Black Axe from Javier Urena's Celanawe sculpt (this was just to get the angle looking more realistic.): https://javier_urena.artstation.com/projects/5XDDz

I printed out the above layout and taped that to the back of a sheet of 14"x 17" Strathmore bristol board. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol down to the printout to use as a guide while I inked the final drawing.

I used a 0.7 Copic Multiliner SP pen to do all the inkwork. While inking the details for Savage Dragon was important (all that body hair and musculature), the real time consiming part was inking the smoke plumes. I'd done a similar technique in a past Plotmasters piece for the 'Claw' episode: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2021/05/plotmasters-claw.html

The inks were scanned and I started digitally coloring the piece. This involves blocking in flat colors to establish each color's shape. Most of the color choices had been made by reference the colors from Erik Larsen's comic as well as from my layout.

In this step I also established color holds (areas where I want the inklines to be a color other than black) on the smoke plumes and all the debris.

The sky background does have a bit of rendering at this stage...I dropped in a gradient fill and then used a paintbrush to make some variance in the color and value structure.

The last step was to do the final rendering and lighting effects for the piece. I did some of this using the dodge and burn tools and a stock Photoshop brush, but I also relied heavily on a layer masked off to just the character to add more of that warm light glow

This piece will be published in the Baltimore Yearbook in October. That book will be available for purchase at the convention and through the con's website afterwards. The original inked piece will also be for sale in the art auction at the con on Saturday.

Past Baltimore Yearbook pieces & blogposts: