DRAGON LANDSCAPE ART SKIN

Further is the rounded shape of the head, a slightly elongated snout, a blow hole (very key!) and lastly a hint of a dorsal fin along the back.

DRAGON LANDSCAPE ART SKIN

Next there is the use of a few select highlights on a dark skin to suggest a smooth, glistening surface. First off we have the scale of the dragon to establish the relative size of the dolphin, and that is mostly set by the way the waves interact in and around the body of the dragon and the shoreline of the coast. The challenge here was to leverage other aspects of the creature in order to convey its nature. How do we know it is a dolphin though? Does it have a mouth, eyes, tail, and overall shape of a dolphin? If you guessed ‘nice juicy fisshess’ then you win!! If it was ‘dolphin’ then that is a close second. That is a whole other post (or 50 posts to really get into a discussion) Always remember that you are creating ‘art’ and not attempting to only ‘copy’ what your eyes are ‘seeing’. Taking cues fro other artists works, nature, or photographs are a great way to jump start this experiment, but be careful not to be a ‘slave’ to your reference. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and try something outrageous and see if you can incorporate that new visual language into the evolving ‘truth’ inside the painting. How the hell can we paint clouds the color of a rainbow anyway? I don’t know how really, it just works. But that is the challenge, to get us all to think about what we are seeing, and not jump to quick conclusions and cliches. The question was a little misleading, as I did ask what ‘color’, not ‘colors’. Nor are they blue, purple, yellow, pink, green, magenta, orange, red, nor gray. But upon close inspection we can see there is nearly no real black used in its rendering. Here we have a modestly light background, thus making the head appear dark. The colors we see are informed by those in their their immediate surroundings, thus the feeling of darkness, or black, may change pending on the comparative color/value you are establishing the basis of evaluation from. While not incorrect to broadly label a color’s chroma, as artists we need to be much more specific when it comes to choices. Many times viewers cannot see the subtlety of color, because they likely have never painted nor looked closely enough to comparatively assess color in highly localized areas. If you said black, yellow, or red, then you missed the mark and over generalized. If you guessed dull muddy umber-black with hints of pale yellow ocher, backed up by warm shadows pushing into dirty red/magentas, and finished off with cooler neutral grays as highlights, then you hit the nail on the head! Congratulations! How you interpret that is a gift to artists, nor does it exclude weaving in some other colors into the mix as well! So, on with our first question. For those hard-core fans out there of A Song of Ice and Fire, you know that Drogon is a black dragon with hints of red. I thought we could play a ‘guessing’ game today with these detail shots and see how things pan out for the absolutist lurking in every critic. Thus what is presented here from a few inspirational pathways is a reflection of a unique convergence:Ī handful of detailed shots follow to illuminate a few of the choices undertaken to bring this image into a coherent whole. Of course I couldn’t refrain from making the art only about the landscape and found the need to inject my love of story, narration and the fantastic. A recent bout of beautiful sunsets put me onto creating a new work centered around a landscape.

Dragon landscape art