For Your Consideration: A Dragon

Here's a dragon that I just made. I was at a grammar school concert with nothing to do with my eyes. So I made sure to have my book and a couple of pens with me to keep me occupied. Unfortunately, I was seated on bleachers which hate me and all people who need to sit on them. But I struggled on with the dragon. After all, without something to occupy me, my mind wanders and I don't pay attention to what's going on.

I made this one with no preliminary drawing, just straight to pen. After the pen work was mostly done, I switched to watercolor pencils. I hope you like it.

I'm a fun guy, right?

Dreams and Visions

I think I have settled on Dreams and Visions as the title for my current drawing book. (If you don't know what a drawing book is, read this.) No, I don't think I am an artistic prophet of the Romantic 19th century variety. It's just that I have spent the better part of the last year looking over the drawings that are manifesting themselves in my book and I am noticing patterns that are developing.

What patterns you ask? Well, for one thing, all sorts of stuff is leaping out of my head:

These images are in the order in which I made them. You may be noticing how there is a progression here; it's not just things popping out of my head. Well, it's at least things popping out of my head; but I believe it's more than that.

The first image is a pretty straightforward dream image, there's even a speech bubble to clue the viewer into that fact. This is cut and dried.

The following image has things literally splitting my head open and exploding out. I have a "speech" bubble telling the viewer that these things are all to be found in my books (that's a drawing of a drawing book - a sort of meta-drawing book).

In the third image, I have a flip top head. The speech bubbles are gone and the thoughts just stand on their own.

The fourth image has the things in my imagination not splitting open my head; rather, they are melding with my head as if they all have equal substance with my mind.

And then there's this two page spread. I suppose the one on the left could be a surrogate for me - it's not exactly a self portrait as it doesn't look like me. Anyway, I think it's a toss up as to wether this is a drawing of a dragon and a fish with faces on them or if it's a drawing of two faces with a dragon and a fish hitching a ride. I'm not sure myself. The visions have an equal presence as the heads. They are both concrete.

I have not shown you everything - not by a long shot, but I hope you get the idea of how what it is a particular book is about begins to reveal itself to me.

So this is what happens when you don't really listen to your art director all that closely. He says that he needs a simple line drawing of a Chinese dragon. I hear "Chinese dragon, line drawing". It's hard to hold back on something like this. But I thought I was holding back - it's just lines, right? But he said that it was great and would look good in one of my drawing books, but that it isn't what he needed. So I had to do it again. I made a time lapse of the smaller drawing that he actually wanted (below). By the way, go ahead and print out the big dragon as a coloring page - it'll be fun.

Here's a better look at the watercolor that I did in the time lapse that I posted yesterday.

This, by the way, is in a "new" drawing book (that I started 6 months ago).

Dragon

Just because I like monsters and dinosaurs and dragons so much. This one, like a lot of my color stuff these days is in Photoshop. There are things I like very much about working digitally and things that I like not so much. It seems like I am almost getting it when it comes to Photoshop, but there is just something that I can't quite put my finger on. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

Perelandra Cross Section

This has been inordinately frustrating for me. I'm not entirely happy with it nor do I hate it. There are parts that I really like and there are parts that I hope you really don't notice. I've spent a shameful amount of time on this and I hope I'm done; we'll see what my AD says.