Dragon

So, the past month or so has been tumultuous to say the least. Unsurprisingly my work ethic has suffered a good deal but it's also forced a lot of odd inspiration and raw emotion to be pulled back into what work I was doing. School projects of late have been rather mediocre and very draining so a few weeks back I wound up starting a personal project and only recently completed it. Unsurprisingly it was very refreshing to do something that was 100% for me, and I'd like to keep the trend going here in my spare time.

However as fun as it was it wasn't without any kinks as it went along. Either way, I did take a couple of pictures here and there of what actually went into this guy (had meant to take many more wip shots but obviously forgot to do so)
But thumbnails were the first thing to accomplish here, and my goal/subject was simple. A dragon. King of the beasts as far as fantasy is concerned and I knew I wanted to draw on a lot more of the sleazy hoarder legends than the really cool monster idea.

I know my thumbnails typically border on illegible, but being a personal project I continued on from this point with a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish.
I chose one of my thumbs, blew it up digitally, finagled with it's design and line work before printing out a copy that I could transfer via the opaque projector on campus (that machine is magical).
After that I was in high spirits when I got home so I started out painting right away on a sheet of gessoed crescent board I happened to have. My first mistake here was to leap in without an under-painting. With no value established on the board I can see from the pictures I had taken that I was really just making more work for myself in the end. But I never got that far.
In my giddy impatience I began baking (carefully, mind you) said painting in order to continue work on it asap. Now, I've baked several pieces this year (mostly for class when I don't have time to let the poor things dry) and each time everything's gone fine. I consider it a small miracle that for all my class work I'd been working on Bainbridge illustration board. I'm presuming that the Crescent board led to the result of a rather nasty bubbling effect that took place under the gesso.


I was too busy trying to save the painting at that point to get pictures but I assure you the bubble was fantastic in its own right. I'll be holding more tests on illustration board scraps I have lying around to confirm/deny that the fact that it was crescent board led to it's early demise.

In the end though, things worked out for the best. The next round I did an under-painting (no pictures again, I'm terrible at this).


And on a whole the painting progressed fairly fast.


I only just finished it a few days ago and I'm going to have to get some scans of it, but in the meantime have a not too shabby picture via my camera.