Dragon
02 May 2021
I decided to paint a dragon, taking inspiration from various reptiles.
The oil painting shows a large fictional reptilian, facing from the right of the painting towards the left. Its mouth is open, with all teeth showing, as it gives challenge. The dragon is somewhere between black and dark grey, with a red underthroat and belly, and an ochre eye.
The background is painted with a brown, green and grey stippled haze, except for in front of the dragon’s mouth, where it is warped by haze.
The jawline, teeth and eye are from various crocodilians. The face scales are somewhere between a Komodo dragon and an iguana, and the spikes were painted taking inspiration from alligator neck scutes.
Nine images showing the painting process:
1) background, 2) head and neck outline, 3) adding the eye and thickening the neck/ chest, 4) adding neck spikes and building up the 3D shape, 5) adding teeth and adding skin folds to the throat/chest, 6) adding scales, 7) adding stippling to the underside of the upper and lower jaws, 8 & 9) adding highlights and lowlights to the scales
I spent a long time working through possible variations and inspirations in advance, using photographs of reptiles as reference models.
The practice sketches were mostly done in acrylic paint.
Top: the painting shows four crocodilian eyes (or at least I think they were all crocodilians). One yellow, one hazel, one green and one red.
Bottom: the painting shows an alligator’s jawline and teeth. The alligator is painted with fairly crude strokes, emphasising the general shape without fine detail.
Once I had decided what major elements I wanted in my dragon, I completed several quick acrylic paintings to test how they fitted together.
The painting shows a large reptilian, extending across two pages of a sketch book from top right to bottom left. As with the final image, the jaw and eye are of a crocodilian. The dragon is dark grey, tending towards black with a red underbelly and throat. The scales are painted on with large brushstrokes, more implying the shapes of the scales than specifying them using fine detail.