Illustration Week 3 - Twirl

Alright! Another week gone by. This time the word is Twirl. I immediately had a million ideas for this, and after some thought, I decided on a fantasy theme involving dragons. They`re so fun to draw because of all the little details they can have.

I started off by looking up lot`s of different illustrations of dragons on Google searches, as well as sites like conceptart.org. I also looked at the art of some artists from the early days for good composition, but also successful uses of color. I want this piece to be full of depth and radiant colours.

 While nibbling on chicken wings, I flipped through some flickr sets and found the work of Bruce Bomberger. Not only is his name epic, so is his artwork.

This is predominately blue with yellow, but it has a variety of values, giving it a lot of depth. There is fantastic visual contrast using lighting, and it really caught my eye. I hope to achieve something like this in my next work.

I really enjoyed the thumbnail process for this, and it didn't take me very long. I plan to do some more to map out the two characters I plan to use in the final piece; A dancer and a dragon.

As I drew the dragon and girl over and over to evolve their appearance, I also tried to think about what sort of setting I wanted them to suit. I settled on a water based setting, and designed my dragon to be a leviathan. The girl I wanted to appear wild, but still graceful since she is a dancer. I gave her a fur headdress with a jeweled crown, and made the headdress large and wild. I tried to include face paint thinking it would accent the wild side but it didn't work too well, so that was scrapped right away.

The outfit was modeled after belly dancers, because it's lovely, fluid and detailed but doesn't clash with the headdress.
Now to dive into Photoshop!