fantasy art: a fairly generic dragon

Genre/Fandom: original fantasy
Characters/Pairings: some random dragon
Media: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a bit of color pencil

dragon drawing, initial pencils — screen resolution (ca. 200k)
dragon drawing, inked lineart — screen resolution (ca. 200k)
dragon drawing, ink and acrylics — screen resolution (ca. 230k)
detail of the head — high resolution (ca. 224k)

Notes/comments: I made some longer notes on my process, because this is the first time I used acrylics to color a drawing. The white border is a result of me having to tape my cheap, thin (and thus not ideally suited for wet colors) paper down securely to prevent warping, which worked surprisingly well. In RL it there’s still bits of tape stuck to the border, but I removed those from the scan. Otherwise I didn’t do any digital cleanup work on this though.

This was the first time I used acrylic paint to color a drawing (the only things I’ve done with it before was decorating wood), so there was a bit of trial and error involved, and it doesn’t quite look like I imagined, but it’s not too awful, and I quite like how some things turned out.

Anyway, first I inked the pencils I’ve posted with waterproof indian ink. I used two fine liners, and unfortunately my smallest one was a bit thicker than I’d have liked for some of the detail lines. I scanned the inks in case I’d totally mess up with the acrylic paint, if you want to look, they are here. I decided to apply the acrylic paint mostly in watery glazes, so I soaked the paper, stretched and taped it to a board and then applied the first background glazes completely wet in wet, more towards the burnt sienna on the lower half more yellowish in the upper, then when that dried I added more layers wet on dry and some texture with a sponge, and made the lower half more grey because by then I had decided to make the dragon brownish red and sienna background wouldn’t have had enough contrast. The grey is the result from adding glazes with blue and umbra, btw, not a grey from black. The general consensus seems to be that grey and black from colors are less flat than those from thinned black, so that’s what I went with.

Then I painted the dragon with various thin layers of reds, sienna, and purplish colors until I got the colors that I mostly liked. It was kind of fun to be able to just paint them over each other without the dry layers dissolving again as water colors do. The shadowed areas were made darker by adding umbra and below the dragon also blue. The spikes and claws were at this point still the background yellowish, so I painted those over with white with a bit of violet in it, and the eyes with a more intense yellow. I did a few highlights too, but that didn’t work so well for me.

Once the whole thing dried I inked some of the outlines again, because they had become a bit muddled with the glazes over them, and I like the clean look of lineart remaining even in the colored painting, and then added a few more highlights and some finicky stuff like some of the scales with colored pencils. It all took many hours, but then I don’t color fast on the computer either.