Crouching Tiger Painted Dragon

Hi there,

It's been awhile since my last post. I could spout many excuses about having my braces taken off and moving to my new uni house (the packing was never ending! I may still be suffering from mild trauma...) but the real reason I haven't posted something recently is because I am lazy and a chronic procrastinator. ( I need to keep doing small things so that I'm not over exerting myself but also to that I am staving off the immanent period of just doing nothing of consequence for days or weeks.)

But I did do something mildly productive in the days before my big move into my new home. I painted.

Before I finished my first year of uni I promised my gorgeous boyfriend that I would paint him something that he could put up in his room and after many weeks of procrastination deliberation on my part I decided to paint my take on a Chinese style dragon with the only prerequisites being that it was green, gold and black.

Concept art

Here is my concept drawing of roughly what I wanted my dragon to look like. As you can see I like to draw my dragons fairly elaborately with lost of curving spinal plates and an elaborate head and tail to give the impression of a elegant dragon. (That an I am a sucker for lots of detail to hide my scruffy sketches.) You may also see faint lines on the body which suggest arms. I wasn't at this stage sure if I wanted to draw arms as I though this might take away from the Chinese-iness of my dragon and make it more medieval European looking.

Background filled in.

So I went for the arms. What can I say...I think a dragon should have arms so that it can walk around and stuff. (And no, it does not need wings to fly. It is a Chinese dragon and flies with it's mystical dragon powers. Haku in Spirited Away didn't have wings so neither does my dragon.) I chose to paint the background purple as I thought that I would make the best contrast with the green of the dragon. I have also changed the spinal plates slightly as I decided I'd have it look a little more scary and fearsome than just elegant.

Spinal plates!

So here I have done the spinal plates in black and tipped them with gold paint so that they catch the light but also because this creates a greater contrast with the background. This bit was good fun and allowed me to go a bit more extreme with the tail.

Finished!

I know what you are thinking. She's got a bit ahead of herself here. And yeah I have. I forgot to take more picture so unfortunately this is the last one. But I am going to talk through it anyway.

I first painted the green body and arms/legs first with a medium green with some gold miked in to give a bit of a shimmer. (OMG this mas the hardest part ever. Trying to keep my hand steady so that i didn't paint over my spinal plates and too far into the background was what I can imagine disabling a bomb feels a bit like. All my effort went into slowly making sure I didn't make any mistakes and ruin my painting that I felt physically, mentally and emotionally tired afterwards.) Once this was finished I did a similar process for the belly plates with the gold paint, paying special attention to where the dragon's body moves to the plates are entirely visible and behind the more prominent part of the body which is closer to the viewer so that it looked more realistic.

Then I painted shadows around the parts of the body would be in shadow around the middle and head but also around the legs to give them definition and the impression that they have come out of the sides of the main body. Then I painted the definition of the belly plates with some black paint and the smallest brush I had.

I left the head to last. I painted it a graduating green turning into black at the spine type areas of the head. Then once again tipped in gold. Lastly I did finishing touched such as shading dark green to the head and then the eye and teeth along with the white claws, finally finishes with the golden touched to the head. 

The voila! my dragon.

I was and am still really pleased with my dragon painting and so is Joe. The only things I would change if I could would be to center it better, taking the legs into account this time as there is quite a lot of empty space on the left side. 

My sister says it looks a bit like a coat of arms...like a Lannister lion. ( I can see where she got that from and probably did influence me a tiny bit.)

Thanks,

TheTinyBookworm

xx

Ps. Sorry for the terrible quality pictures taken off my phone. I will use my camera next time. Lesson learned.